Wide Is the Gate

by Upton Sinclair

  It was after two in the morning when the great man released his visitor. The last thing he said was: “Make your reports as short as you can. One man sent me a long one, and when he asked if I had read it, I told him I hadn’t been able to lift it!”

  He pressed a button, and told his colored valet to summon Gus Gennerich. The man came promptly, and escorted Lanny out of the building by the same door they had entered. The rain had stopped, the moon had come out, and Lanny said: “It will be a pleasant day.” The reply was: “Looks like it.” Evidently this ex-policeman didn’t consider it his duty to make conversation with “P.A.’s.” He drove Lanny to his hotel.

  Much later that same morning the art expert turned secret agent set out on the crowded highway to Baltimore, He reached New York before sundown, having approached the city by the Pulaski Skyway, and crossed the George Washington Bridge. He was heading for Newcastle, Connecticut, for he had already engaged steamer passage and desired as much time as possible with his father.

  He had phoned that he was coming, and there was always a warm welcome for him. He had allowed his “Pink” ideas to sink into the background and be forgotten; he had kept his second marriage secret, and to his stepmother and half-brothers and their families he was the art expert and man of the world, lover of music and friend of famous and important people. He didn’t mention that Franklin D. Roosevelt had been added to the list. He talked, instead, about his art adventures, and especially about the Murchisons, whom Robbie knew. To fly to the Adirondacks for a week-end was a decidedly swanky thing, and Lanny’s half-nephew, Robert Budd III, piped up: “Why don’t you build us some passenger planes, Grandfather?”

  Grandfather was sixty-three, an age at which most men think of retiring; but Robbie Budd was just getting ready to conquer the world, by way of the air above it. As a preliminary, he had more than once conquered himself. In his youth he had been “wild,” or so his stern Puritan father had judged him. Lanny was the product of that wildness, and as a result was still looked upon askance by the older generation of Budds; they were a long-lived and long-memoried tribe. Again, a decade or so ago, Robbie had been “playing the market” heavily, and drinking much more than was good for him as a result of the strain, also of the bitterness in his heart against his father and his oldest brother.

  But now all that was over; Robbie’s father was no more, and Robbie was on his own, nourishing colossal hopes. He had broken with Budd Gunmakers, which had been taken over by a Wall Street crowd and was making mostly hardware and “specialties.” Robbie’s heart was set on the dream that some day the new firm, his creation, would have a bigger turnover and pay higher dividends than the family firm which had been wrested from them.

  Robbie Budd lived and breathed and ate and talked airplanes: catwalks and bulkhead segments, stabilizers and de-icers, sub-assemblies and spot-checking—a whole new vocabulary which the members of his household had to learn. Robbie’s conscientious wife, who had suffered at the spectacle of his weaknesses and had even had to take Lanny into her confidence, now shared his high ambitions, and did everything to encourage and help him: inviting the plant engineers to dinner, and even studying the highly technical reports which determined the obsoleteness of the B-EP10 and the expected supremacy of the B-EP11.

  Robbie Budd was a football and polo player who had taken to golf, and had added fifty pounds and a load of dignity. His gray hair became his florid complexion; his manner was hearty, and he enjoyed talking, provided it was with some person who liked to listen to what Robbie liked to talk about. If left to himself, he might have grown slouchy, but his wife kept him in order by the simple device of causing his used garments to disappear and new and spotless ones to be in their place. She kept his home the same way, causing cigar stubs and ashes and used whisky glasses to disappear. The house was large and elegant, but slightly suggestive of a Puritan meeting-house, with plain papered walls and furniture of the sort which Esther’s forefathers had made. On the walls of the drawing-room hung several paintings by Arnold Böcklin which Lanny had found in Germany, knowing that they would please his stepmother because they embodied or were supposed to embody philosophical ideas.

  VII

  Into this household came Lanny on his secret errand. He must get his father to talking, and carefully guide the conversation to the subjects which had been listed for him by That Man in the White House—who was Robbie’s pet peeve and the embodiment of all evil and destructive tendencies of the time. Lanny mustn’t make the mistake of showing too much interest in any one subject; he must let his father ramble along. No notes could be made, but Lanny would fix names and figures in his memory, go to his room and jot them down, and then come back for another load.

  It seemed a mean sort of job, spying on one’s father. But Lanny wasn’t going to report anything which could do Robbie any harm; he was only going to harm the cause which Robbie had taken for his own, the cause of bigger profits for businessmen all over the land; also the maintenance of that autocratic control of industry which Robbie considered essential to its progress, and which Lanny considered a menace to the higher sorts of progress, political, social, intellectual. There was no use arguing the point, no use trying to reconcile or explain two opposite points of view. Nobody could tell Robbie Budd that the workers had any capacity or any right to meddle with the control of industry; Robbie considered that the workers belonged exactly where they were and were getting exactly as much pay as they were worth. Robbie didn’t really consider them competent to have anything to say about politics either, but he was reconciled to that system, having found that he could make deals with the political bosses in his town and county and state. He hadn’t been able to control the Presidency or the Congress, in spite of expensive efforts in combination with other Republican big businessmen; they had tried their best and a few months ago had got a sound licking. Now every time Robbie thought about it he got so hopping-mad that it made his veins swell out dangerously.

  Lanny had to say to himself: “I am a traitor to my family’s ideas; I am a snake in the grass.” He had to say the same thing in the home of his ex-wife and her friends in England, and with most of the fashionable ladies and gentlemen who came to his mother’s home on the French Riviera. He had to take with them the pose of art lover and ivory-tower dweller to whom politics was a base trade, far beneath a gentleman’s notice. He had to listen to the expression of the most reactionary opinions, and if someone asked him a direct question: “What do you think about it, Mr. Budd?”—or Herr Budd, or Monsieur Budd as the case might be—he had to be ready with some playful answer, something that would pass for a mot in the smart world: “Well, all sorts of people manage to make politics pay, and I suppose we shouldn’t be too much surprised if labor tries the same thing.”

  VIII

  What Lanny did with his father was to ask how things were going in the plant; his father told him they had just installed the “mating jigs” for the new model. Lanny expressed interest in this odd form of the reproductive process, with the result that Robbie offered to take him and show him the latest devices. Next morning he was escorted through that quite extensive plant which had sprung up in a few months on what had until recently been a mosquito-breeding marsh. He gazed down from a balcony into a great room which appeared to be a jungle of complex machines, each one beating and pounding out its own individual tune. Lanny knew, of course, that every machine had been placed exactly on a spot which engineers had measured to the hundredth part of an inch; he knew that the motions of those machines were determined in some cases to the hundred-thousandth part of an inch, and that the finest watch had never been built with such care as the pieces of steel and aluminum and magnesium and what not which were here being stamped or ground or polished amid such a variety of sounds that it all became one, an infinitude of racket which, so Lanny was assured, the ears of the workers soon ceased to record at all.

  Down a long line appeared, in process of growth, a row of swift and deadly fighter planes which would
be able to hurl themselves through the air at the rate of a mile every fifteen seconds or less. There weren’t nearly as many on that assembly-line as Robbie had hoped to see, and the line wasn’t moving fast enough to please him; but he stubbornly clung to the belief that old Europe was soon going to war, and then everybody would be calling for Budd-Erling pursuits. Robbie had seen it magically happen in Paris at the end of July 1914, and Lanny had been there, helping as well as a precocious lad could do. Neither had forgotten any detail of it, and so now they could talk to each other in shorthand. Robbie said: “God knows I’m not asking for it, but it’s coming.” Lanny wondered: Was it humanly possible to stake one’s whole fortune on a gamble, and in one’s secret heart not be hoping to win?

  Inside that fabricating plant was order, but outside was chaos. Going and coming, Lanny passed through a string of real-estate subdivisions full of jerrybuilt cottages and shacks of varied ugliness, with gas stations and sodapop stands and “eateries” scattered along the main road. It had grown that way, because that was the way Robbie Budd had willed it; Robbie was not afraid of chaos, but saw danger in any sort of order except his own. Lanny’s heart ached, because in England he had seen garden cities, and in Vienna beautiful blocks of workers’ apartment houses built by the Socialist municipality. Why couldn’t something of that sort have been done in Connecticut?

  But Robbie Budd had his God called Individualism, and this ugly nightmare was His temple. Robbie wanted no government and no workers’ movement of any sort in or near his place; if he could have had his way he would have forbidden all meetings and organizations of any sort whatever. But now the C.I.O., most radical of mass movements, was spreading in his plant, and Robbie was fuming and raging, considering it treason and conspiracy. None the less so because it was backed by the power of the United States government—or as Robbie preferred to put it, by a gang of political shysters who had got hold of the government and were using it to wage a war of vengeance against those who owned property and carried the responsibilities of industry. No doubt whatever of the perfect sincerity of Robbie Budd’s opinion of the “New Deal”!

  IX

  In between tirades Lanny gathered details about the arrangements existing between I. G. Farben, the great German chemical trust, and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey for the sharing and exchange of patents and technical secrets in the production of artificial rubber from petroleum. He learned about similar deals in other industries, and got the names of various persons who had such secrets locked in their bosoms or their safe-deposit vaults. Lanny would say: “Do you really know that, Robbie?” and his father would reply: “Thyssen told me himself”—or perhaps it would be Krupp von Bohlen, or one of the de Wendels or the du Ponts. Oddly enough Robbie Budd himself had somewhat the same arrangement with Göring; Robbie had his men in Göring’s plants and the fat Exzellenz had his in Newcastle—Lanny could be sure of it, for he met them. But he didn’t intend to mention that in his reports to F.D.R. The President had agreed with his new secret agent that it was all to the good to have an aircraft fabricating plant hidden up one of the navigable rivers of Connecticut, and a force of American technicians and workers acquiring the “know-how” in that vitally important industry.

  Also Lanny collected information as to the present status of the Luftwaffe. Some of it came from Robbie, and some from those Nazi technicians, who knew about the younger Budd’s connections in Hitlerland, and thought of him as a friend of their cause. He spoke a fluent German and could tell them about visits to Karinhall and Berchtesgaden. They were bursting with pride over the achievements of their Third Reich, and what more natural than that some of their bursts should be aimed in Lanny’s direction?

  After listening, the investigator would retire to the room which had been his since his first visit twenty years ago; he would set up his little portable machine and type out the report, not forgetting to make it short. He would seal it in an envelope marked “No. 103,” and put this into another envelope addressed to Gus Gennerich at the ex-policeman’s Washington hotel.

  X

  Duty done, Lanny was free to enjoy himself. Early next morning he bade good-by to his father’s family and drove half-way to New York, stopping at the home of the Hansibesses, as he called his half-sister and her violinist husband. Hansi Robin was giving a concert for a workers’ group in New York that evening, and Lanny’s steamer was sailing at midnight. So everything fitted nicely; Lanny would drive the musicians in, after the concert they would see him off, and Bess would drive the car back to her father’s next morning.

  The Hansibesses had a baby boy, now a year old; they had called him Freddi, in memory of his uncle whom the Nazis had murdered. He was Lanny’s half-Jewish half-nephew, with the lovely dark eyes and hair of his father, whom Lanny had called a shepherd boy out of ancient Judea. He was learning to toddle about and to say new words every day, and kept his parents in a state of constant admiration. His grandmother came over from her home to have lunch and meet her adored Lanny, and point out qualities in the treasure-child which might otherwise not be noticed. Hansi was composing a sonata, and he and Bess played the first movement for their visitor, and Bess indicated features in it which her husband was too diffident to mention.

  In the afternoon the grandfather came out from the city. Johannes Robin, formerly Rabinowich, was making money again, though on a far more modest scale than that which he had known in Germany. Upon him rested some of the responsibility for keeping that great Budd-Erling plant going. He had charge of the sales office in New York, and took flying trips to France or Holland or Turkey, to South or Central America, or Canada—for Budd-Erling was making not merely fighter planes, but also an “all-purpose job” which was carrying supplies to mines in the high Andes and to prospectors in the far northern wilderness. Johannes didn’t sell anything to Nazis or Fascists—he left that to his long-time partner, Robbie, who had a stronger stomach. Johannes was tireless in reading newspapers and technical journals, watching out for large-scale business enterprises which perhaps had never realized how they might speed up their work by the use of airplanes.

  A greatly changed Johannes Robin from the eager and rather egotistical person whom Lanny Budd had happened to meet on a railroad train in Europe nearly a quarter of a century ago. Now he was subdued and humbled, content to be alive and to have got his loved ones away to this safe corner of a deadly dangerous world. It no longer worried him that his surviving son and the son’s wife called themselves out-and-out Reds. Johannes would have turned anarchist if he had thought that was a way to bring justice upon the heads of those Nazi barbarians who had murdered his son and come so near to murdering himself. Lanny didn’t have to use any subterfuges in asking a one-time Schieber for information as to the secrets of European haute finance and its deal with the new masters of Germany. Johannes would pour it out in floods, and would have been greatly pleased if he had known what use was going to be made of it.

  XI

  Lanny drove them all in to the concert, which was held in a hall on the East side, its purpose being to collect funds for the aiding of Jews who had escaped into the countries bordering on Hitlerland. The place was packed to the doors with Jewish men and women, some of them old but most of them young, a few bearded but most smooth-shaven, a few well-to-do, but most poor. Jews of all sorts and sizes, but mostly undersized; Jews with dark curly hair and some with red; Jews with Jewish noses, but many who might have been taken for Russians or Poles or Hungarians or Italians or Spaniards. They had been mixed up with all the European tribes for a thousand years, but alas, it hadn’t done them any good. Once upon a time, long ago, a group of Jewish holy men in a fanatical mood had called for the killing of another Jewish holy man, and by an odd quirk of fate posterity had remembered the executed one, but had forgotten that he was Jewish. He was God, and only those who had called for his death had been Jews; so now in the slums of this crowded Manhattan Island tough little Irish boys and tough little Italian boys would frighten little Jewish b
oys by yelling: “Christ-killer!”

  In Germany this hatred had become a mental disease, and Jew-baiting a substitute for social progress. So there was grief in the faces of this crowd and they had come as to a synagogue. It was a labor crowd, and most of them had broken with their ancient faith, but the spectacle of wholesale torture and humiliation had brought them back to the Ark of their Covenant. Hansi Robin, tall and dark-haired, might have stepped out of any of the books of the Old Testament; he stood before them, grave and priestlike, playing the Jewish music that he loved: Kol Nidre and Achron’s Hebrew Prayer, and Ernest Bloch’s Nigun, from the Baal Shem suite. The audience listened spellbound, and many sobbed, and the tears ran down their cheeks. This was a people who made no secret of their woes; who in the old days had rent their garments and wailed, put on sackcloth and sat in their backyards sprinkling their ashpiles over their heads. “My confusion is continually before me, and the shame of my face hath covered me,… Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.… Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.”

  Hansi’s accompaniments were played by his wife, who was a granddaughter of the Puritans, and thus had derived a great part of her moral being from those ancient Jewish scriptures. As for Lanny, he had lived most of his life in the Midi; he loved to laugh and sing and dance, and it came hard to him to lament and torture his soul. But he had committed himself to the Jews by sanctioning his half-sister’s marriage, thus helping to bring a half-Jewish baby into the world; he had taken Hansi’s brother Freddi Robin as his comrade, and in his efforts to save Freddi had got himself into a Nazi dungeon and seen an elderly Jew beaten close to death. So Lanny was bound in soul to that unhappy race; he had to listen to their music and share their torments, to stand by their Wailing Wall and climb to the summit of their Calvary.