Wide Is the Gate

by Upton Sinclair

  So it was a well-kept secret; and when the jobs were done, the bundles were turned over to a labor-union official who saw to the distributing. Members of the railway engineers’ union would take them in their cabs as far as the German border. The Nazis never permitted foreigners to run trains into their land, but there were old-time Socialists on the German train-crews to whom bundles were entrusted. Also there were comrades among the truckmen who handled goods imported into Germany from Holland and Belgium and Switzerland; there were workingmen, miners and others, who came and went between France and Germany, and would carry leaflets in the bottom of their lunch-pails. In one way or another, the free workers of the border states kept a stream of literature filtering into Naziland; and when a German worker, whose organization had been wiped out and his newspapers gleichgeschaltet, got hold of a collection of facts from the outside world, it was more precious to him than a lump of gold; he passed it round to everybody he could trust, and a single piece of paper would be read until it was worn ragged.

  The Nazis were countermining all the time, of course; their agents would come among the German workers, posing as loyal comrades and knowing all the lingo. They would win the confidence of some naive man or woman and penetrate into some group; then, in the small hours of the morning, the Gestapo would descend upon the homes of all persons involved, search their belongings, and carry prisoners and evidence to their headquarters. After that in the underground dungeons the torturing would go on for days and weeks. Human flesh would be mutilated and human nerves racked, until some weak one would give way and name the leaders—or perhaps in his desperation name some perfectly innocent persons, anybody, anything, to escape from unendurable pain.

  Such was the deadly conflict now going on in the land which had once been the land of Goethe and Schiller, of Beethoven and Bach. To Trudi and Lanny it was a struggle over the future not merely of Germany but of civilization. For four years now the Nazis had been getting ready for war; while talking peace and reconciliation they were going ahead day and night, bending every energy of a great industrialized nation to military preparation on a scale never before known in history. Under their system there were no longer any personal rights of any sort; the State was everything, and the State was a Moloch, a brazen monster with a belly full of fire and a wide gaping mouth into which were to be fed the whole product of German industry, and the bodies, minds, and souls of all Germans at home and abroad.

  The unsettled question was, would the German people stand it? Could their dissenting elements be suppressed and all traces of opposition destroyed? If so, then a dreadful war was certain. The world outside was blind and couldn’t be made to see it. The business of the outside world was making money, and nobody seemed to care very much where or how—ask Lanny’s father about that. Lanny’s father advertised the claim that he was making the deadliest airplane in the world, and he had sold the Nazis as many as they would pay for. If they hadn’t bought large numbers, it was because General Goring intended to make a better plane, availing himself freely of Robbie’s ideas and disregarding entirely the existence of international patent laws.

  To the son and the new daughter-in-law of Robbie Budd it appeared that he was helping the Nazis to destroy everything in the world that was precious, the whole cultural and moral heritage of mankind. What the Nazis meant to do to the rest of the world they were showing clearly in Spain, a sort of laboratory in which they were testing their plans and their propaganda, as well as the various new instruments of slaughter they were contriving. Everything that worked would be used, and that which failed would be discarded and destroyed—human material as well as military.

  So to the young couple, and to thousands of their way of thinking, it appeared that the destiny of mankind was being decided along the line of the Manzanares River in front of Madrid, and in those new academic buildings in University City which were now serving as fortifications against wild and bloodthirsty Moors. That was the military front; and the propaganda front, no less important, consisted of a secret radio station which was telling the German people the truth night after night, and bundles of anti-Nazi literature which a handful of devoted men and women were smuggling into Hitlerland and placing in lunch-pails or under the door-cracks of German workers’ homes.

  II

  Trudi never went back to the studio on the Left Bank. Her few possessions there were not worth the risk involved in recovering them. “Start over again,” Lanny said; “as if there had been a fire.” She rented a somewhat more roomy studio in Montmartre, using her latest “maiden name” of Corning. She promised to exercise the utmost caution, never going out except at night; Lanny would do her shopping and bring her supplies, always parking his car some distance away and watching carefully to make certain that no one followed him.

  She wrote a note to her clarinetist, whose name she had not told Lanny. She told the man to be in front of a certain building at a certain hour of the night, and to use every precaution to be alone. Lanny was to drive past in his car, with Trudi in the back seat, the curtains down and only a small place to look through. If the man wasn’t there, they would drive on. If he was there, Lanny would turn a corner and let Trudi out of the car; then he would drive around the block and pass the spot again to make sure that she was all right. Lanny would have his Budd automatic along, for surely no Gestapo agents were going to kidnap his wife without shooting.

  This was a critical moment in Trudi’s affairs, for if her confederate had had to disappear like herself, they might have had trouble finding each other again. But there he was, and Trudi got out and joined him, and Lanny saw them strolling along a dark street and had to assume that everything was all right. She told him afterward that the clarinetist had taken alarm and moved away from his home just as she had done, leaving everything behind him, including his beloved instrument. But one of his pupils, a clever French lad, had gone and got his mail for him; so they had got a fresh start, and would play hide-and-seek with the Nazis for a while longer. Neither would have the other’s new address, but they would meet at an agreed place once a week. Trudi had slipped him a wad of bills, and told him to use some of the money for his personal needs.

  Such was the game of cross and doublecross which was being played all over Europe and indeed all over the world: Nazis and anti-Nazis, Fascists and anti-Fascists, Spanish “Nationalists” against Loyalists, Reds and Pinks of every shade against Royalists, Croix de Feu, Jeunesses Patriotes, and politicians for sale to whoever offered the highest rewards in jobs, publicity, and cash. When you took part in that game it was like leaving the civilized world and going back into the jungle where fierce beasts stalked one another and would start at once stalking you. There was no limit to the treacheries, the stratagems, the traps; you pitted your wits against creatures who had nothing to think about but outwitting you, and very soon you found that if you were going to survive you could think about nothing but outwitting them.

  III

  Among the messages which Lanny had found waiting him at his hotel in Paris was an old one from his father, saying that he was sailing for Germany and suggesting that Lanny should meet him in Berlin. It would have been interesting, but rather sickening, Lanny decided; to listen to his father wrangling with that “Mister Obese,” like two jackals over a carcass. Not even the fact that Lanny was entitled to a bone out of it could cause him to enjoy the spectacle. He sent Robbie a telegram to the Adlon, and a few hours later received a reply saying that his father was returning by way of Paris and would meet him in a couple of days. Robbie added: “Bringing bacon get out frying-pan”—which was a kind of code, unless you had lived in America.

  “Change and decay in all around I see”—so declares a much-loved hymn, and the sad words applied to Lanny Budd’s relations with the first and greatest hero of his life. More joyful than Christmas, far more fun than birthday parties had been those days when a telegram or postcard had arrived at Bienvenu saying that the brilliant and adored salesman of munitions was on the way. That
had been true in boyhood and youth, even in early manhood when Lanny had packed his bags and driven to Paris or London to meet his father. But now the years had rubbed all the glamour away; Robbie Budd’s calm assurance, his manner of commanding everything he wanted, his regal prodigality in distributing largess—all that seemed crude and second-rate. It was obvious that Robbie drank too much whisky for his own good, and when he began telling Lanny about the world they both lived in, he revealed himself as an opinionated and ill-informed victim of the acquisitive instinct.

  But it had become Lanny’s duty to meet many such persons, to hear them talk and understand them as products of their environment. In this case it was his duty to hear his father’s story and collect all possible information regarding Germany’s war preparations, especially in the air and especially over Spain. All this would make the basis for another article by “Cato,” the pen-name which Rick was now using in one of the English weeklies. Incidentally, Lanny would put in his claim for a pursuit plane, and while he wouldn’t get it, he might be able to pry a considerable sum away from his father’s work for the benefit of his own.

  Considered purely as a story, the one which Robbie Budd had to tell was rather magnificent. When he had first got Lanny’s cablegram about the stolen patents he had been furious, and still more so when the data had come and he had made sure that Lanny was right. But on the steamer the man of affairs had thought it over calmly and recalled the ancient adage about molasses compared with vinegar as a bait for flies. After all, what was Budd-Erling in business for? Not to provide its president the luxury of quarreling with a fat egotist. Much better to play ball with him and get a large cut in the gate receipts—thus Robbie Budd, talking American.

  He had approached the bemedaled commander in the role of the skilled munitions salesman, one who has good goods to sell and is much troubled because a customer is not placing the expected orders. “You know, Hermann”—they had got on those terms of intimacy—“I cannot keep a fabricating plant going without orders, and it has certainly proved a useful thing for you that Yankee ingenuity has been turned to making speed and maneuverability in airplanes.”

  Yes, the fat Hermann could assent to that without loss of dignity. The Budd-Erling was an excellent product; but it was very expensive, and Germany was a poor country, having been plundered in the international fraud called reparations—

  “Listen, my friend,” said Robbie Budd, “you and I are grown men and must treat each other as mental equals. We both know that Germany stopped paying reparations very quickly. Germany borrowed the money from our banks—my brother-in-law’s Newcastle bank among them—and if I were to ask when you plan to pay, you would no longer enjoy my society.” The bulky General, now Feldmarschall, had a sense of humor, and grinned.

  “But he didn’t enjoy what came next,” said Robbie, telling the story in high good spirits. “I told him that I appreciated his position, caught with this Spanish war on his hands, and so much more costly than he had anticipated. Naturally a plane has to be tried out in battle and corrected in a hurry when its faults are revealed. So I provided him with an alibi—he could still talk as one gentleman to another. You should have seen his face when I began to reveal my knowledge of what he had done to the Tornado engine, and the new tail-assembly he had put onto his imitation of our P9. I had enlargements made of your photographs, which were remarkably clear, and our experts had studied them, and I had every smallest detail exactly right.”

  “Did you show him the photos?”

  “I didn’t even tell him what I had got, or where, or how. I left him to suppose that I must have got the blueprints out of his own drafting-room. I gave him the engine number and other numbers, telling him that I knew he had been shipping these to Spain and fighting them there with his picked men. Of course that made it much worse from his point of view; no doubt he’s been shooting some of his top-flight men, or at any rate frightening them to death.”

  “And what did he say?” It was up to Lanny to show appreciation of this melodrama.

  “I took the sting out of it deliberately. I let him know that I hadn’t come to quarrel with him; I considered that he was helping me as well as himself in keeping Bolshevism out of the Western world; but I expected him to understand my position equally well. I had to keep a plant going, and some day it might be a fortunate thing for him that planes were being turned out in a neutral country where he could buy all he needed.”

  “‘I’d never be able to,’ he said; ‘the British would blockade me.’ You see what is in his mind.”

  “That’s no news to me,” replied the son.

  “I answered that it wouldn’t be long before we’d have planes with the ability to fly the Atlantic, and after that the British wouldn’t be blockading anybody. ‘You can be sure,’ I said, ‘that Budd-Erling is one plant where you will be able to trade on equal terms with anybody. I’m no lover of the British—they have been my trade rivals all my life, and if I should tell you the tricks they have played on me I could take the rest of the evening.’”

  “And what then?”

  “He didn’t fail to realize that I had the making of a scandal; I could give him a black eye that would keep American business men from ever trusting him. But I had no desire to do that—I just wanted a fair share of what he was getting out of the Spanish war, both in profits and experience. And believe me, I got it!”

  “You think he’ll keep the bargain this time?”

  “So far as his blueprints are concerned, probably not. He has agreed that from now on we are to work together to improve the plane and that I’m to have everything new that involves our patents or is derived from our Budd-Erling ideas. There’s plenty of ground for dispute there and he’ll no doubt cheat me all he dares; but he can’t get out of our contract so far as payments are concerned. He pays four times the royalty he offered me a year ago, and he agrees to pay cash on delivery for twenty planes a month for at least five years and as long thereafter as he continues to use our principles. That means that we’re on easy street.”

  Lanny would have liked to say: “It means that you’re in the redlight district.” But it wouldn’t have done any good. He waited for his father to come to the part of the story which had to do with himself.

  “That was a valuable service you did me, Lanny, and I’m proud of your quick wit. It puts me in a somewhat awkward position, because you’re my son. What I’m going to do is to call a meeting of our directors and tell them the story and put it up to them. My guess is they will vote you somewhere between ten and twenty thousand dollars of Budd-Erling stock.”

  “Well, thank you,” said the son. “You understand, of course, I’d much rather have one or two planes, and the firm would save money.”

  “No, it wouldn’t. You know perfectly well what it would do to us if a Budd-Erling plane were to appear in the air over Spain on the wrong side. I’m sorry as hell for those two boys, but it’s their own doing, and I can only hope and pray to God that you are not committing yourself to that crazy adventure and compromising the name of your family.”

  IV

  Robbie told about events at home. The American people were in a panic over the possibility of being drawn into the war; the American people were “isolationist,” demanding to stay at home, mind their own business, and let the rest of the world destroy itself if it chose. The newly elected Congress had met, and its first step was to plug a hole in the Neutrality Act, making it apply to civil wars as well as other sorts. From now on no military supplies could be shipped to either Insurgents or Loyalists.

  There had been a rather comical race between Congress and a freightship called the Mar Cantabrico, which had been loading two million dollars’ worth of cartridges and airplanes at a Brooklyn pier. The army, according to its practice, had sold at auction a lot of used airplane motors, and these had been bought by parties unknown and were believed to be on board this vessel, bound for Valencia. The port authorities did everything they could to delay the sailing, and the
captain and crew resisted, even to the extent of a scuffle on the deck. The vessel departed in a hurry, leaving some of the airplanes behind, and was followed by Coast Guard speedboats and a plane, on the chance that the bill might be passed and signed before she was too far away from shore. When she was nearing Spanish waters, some German or Italian warship might intercept her, or some unknown submarine sink her, and then what might the dignity and honor of the United States government require us to do? The people remembered how their dignity and honor had got them into the last war, and were very much afraid of these appurtenances.

  Father and son discussed these problems while driving out to spend the night with the de Bruynes. The new act wasn’t going to make much difference to Robbie, because he could sell his products to Germany, Italy, and Portugal. But Robbie was opposed on general principles to having politicians telling business men what they should or shouldn’t do. Every such interference was an encroachment upon the American enterprise system—so Robbie had taken to calling what his son referred to as “capitalism.” Now, once or twice the father called it “democracy,” and this amused the son, who all his life had heard Robbie denounce democracy as the greatest danger confronting his native land. But times had changed, the New Deal had been re-elected, and American big business men had decided to establish capitalism and democracy as one and the same thing.