I
TНЕ trim white Bessie Budd was among the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved
and sung, and where Lanny at the age of fourteen had fished and swum and climbed hills and
gazed upon the ruins of ancient temples. The yacht stole through the Gulf of Corinth and made
fast to a pier in the harbor of the Piraeus, now somewhat improved; the guests were motored to
the city of Athens, and ascended the hill of the Acropolis on little donkeys which had not been
improved in any way. They gazed at the most-famous of all ruins, and Lanny told them about
Isadora Duncan dancing here, and how she had explained to the shocked police that it was her
way of praying.
The Bessie Budd anchored in the Channel of Atalante, and the experienced Lanny let down
fishing-lines and brought up odd-appearing creatures which had not changed in sixteen years,
and perhaps not in sixteen million. The guests were rowed ashore at several towns, and drank
over-sweet coffee out of copper pots with long handles, and gazed at the strange spectacle of
tall men wearing accordion-pleated and starched white skirts like those of ballet-dancers. They
climbed the hills surmounted by ancient temples, and tried to talk in sign language to
shepherds having shelters of brush built into little cones.
History had been made in these waters between Lanny's visits. German submarines had
lurked here, British and French craft had hunted them, and a bitter duel of intrigue had been
carried on over the part which Greece was to play. The Allies had landed an army at Salonika,
and the Bessie Budd now followed in the wake of their transports; her guests were driven
about in a dusty old city of narrow crooked streets and great numbers of mosques with
towering minarets. The more active members of the party wandered over the hills where the
armies of Alexander had marched to the conquest of Persia; through which the Slavs had come in
the seventh century, followed by Bulgars, Saracens, Gauls, Venetians, Turks.
There are people who have a sense of the past; they are stirred by the thought of it, and by the
presence of its relics; there are others who have very little of this sense, and would rather play a
game of bridge than climb a hill to see where a battle was fought or a goddess was worshiped.
Lanny discovered that his wife was among these latter. She was interested in the stories he told
the company, but only mildly, and while he and Hansi were studying the fragments of a fallen
column, Irma would be watching the baby lambs gamboling among the spring flowers. "Oh, how
charming!" Observing one of them beginning to nuzzle its mother, she would look at her wrist-
watch and say: "Don't forget that we have to be back on board in an hour." Lanny would return
to the world of now, and resume the delights of child study which he had begun long ago with
Marceline.
II
When you live day and night on a yacht, in close contact with your fellow-guests, there isn't
much they can hide from you. It was Lanny's fourth cruise with a Jewish man of money, but
still he did not tire of studying a subtle and complex personality. Johannes Robin was not
merely an individual; he was a race and a culture, a religion and a history of a large part of human
society for several thousand years. To understand him fully was a problem not merely in
psychology, but in business and finance, in literature and language, ethnology, archaeology—a list
of subjects about which Lanny was curious.
This man of many affairs could be tender-hearted as a child, and again could state flatly that he
was not in business for his health. He could be frank to the point of dubious taste, or he
could be devious as any of the diplomats whom Lanny had watched at a dozen international
conferences. He would drive a hard bargain, and then turn around and spend a fortune upon
hospitality to that same person. He was bold, yet he was haunted by fears. He ardently desired
the approval of his fellows, yet he would study them and pass judgments indicating that their
opinion was not worth so very much. Finally, with his keen mind he observed these conflicts in
himself, and to Lanny, whom he trusted, he would blurt them out in disconcerting fashion.
They were sitting on deck after the others had gone to bed; a still night, and the yacht gliding
through the water with scarcely a sound. Suddenly the host remarked: "Do you know what this
show costs every hour?"
"I never tried to estimate," said the guest, taken aback.
"You wouldn't, because you've always had money. I figured it up last night—about a hundred
dollars every hour of the day or night. It cost me several hours' sleep to realize it."
There was a pause. Lanny didn't know what to say.
"It's a weakness; I suppose it's racial. I can't get over the fear of spending so much!"
"Why do you do it, then?"
"I force myself to be rational. What good is money if you hoard it? My children don't want it,
and their children won't know how to use it; and, anyhow, it mayn't last. I assume that I give my
friends some pleasure, and I don't do any harm that I can think of. Can you?"
"No," replied the other.
"Of course I shouldn't mention it," said the host, "but you like to understand people."
"We'd all be happier if we did," replied Lanny. "I, too, am conscious of weaknesses. If I
happened to be in your position, I would be trying to make up my mind whether I had a right
to own a yacht."
III
Lanny went to bed thinking about this "racial" peculiarity. When he had first met Johannes
Robin, the salesman had been traveling over Europe with two heavy suitcases full of electric
curling-irons and toasters, and a "spiel" about promoting international trade and the spread of
civilization. During the war he had made money buying magnetos and such things to be sold in
Germany. Then he had gone in with Robbie Budd and bought left-over supplies of the American
army. He had sold marks and bought shares in German industry, and now he was sometimes
referred to as a "king" of this and that. Doubtless all kings, underneath their crowns and inside
their royal robes, were hesitant and worried mortals, craving affection and tormented by fears of
poison and daggers, of demons and gods, or, in these modem times, of financial collapses and
revolutions.
Jascha Rabinowich had changed his name but had remained a Jew, which meant that he was
race-conscious; he was kept that way by contempt and persecution. Part of the time he
blustered and part of the time he cringed, but he tried to hide both moods. What he wanted
was to be a man like other men, and to be judged according to his merits. But he had had to flee
from a pogrom in Russia, and he lived in Germany knowing that great numbers of people
despised and hated him; he knew that even in America, which he considered the most
enlightened of countries, the people in the slums would call him a "sheeny" and a Christ-killer,
while the "best" people would exclude him from their country clubs.
He talked about all this with Lanny, who had fought hard for his sister's right to marry
Hansi. People accused the Jews of loving money abnormally. "We are traders," said
Johannes. "We have been traders for a couple of thousand years, because we have been driven
from our land. We have had to hide in whatever holes we could find in one of these
Mediterranean ports, and subsist by buying something at a low price and selling it at a higher
price. The penalty of failure being death has sharpened our wits. In a port it often happens that
we buy from a person we shall never see again, and sell to some other person under the same
conditions; they do not worry much about our welfare, nor we about theirs. That may be a
limitation in our morality, but it is easy to understand."
Lanny admitted that he understood it, and his host continued:
"My ancestors were master-traders all the way from Smyrna to Gibraltar while yours were
barbarians in the dark northern forests, killing the aurochs with clubs and spears. Naturally our
view of life was different from yours. But when you take to commerce, the differences disappear
quickly. I have heard that in your ancestral state of Connecticut the Yankee does not have his
feelings hurt when you call him slick. You have heard, perhaps, of David Harum, who traded
horses."
"I have heard also of Potash and Perlmutter," said Lanny, with a smile.
"It is the same here, all around the shores of this ancient sea which once was the civilized world.
The Greeks are considered skillful traders; take Zaharoff, for example. The Turks are not easy
to deceive, and I am told that the Armenians can get the better of any race in the world.
Always, of course, I am referring to the professional traders, those who live or die by it. The
peasant is a different proposition; the primary producer is the predestined victim, whether he is in
Connecticut buying wooden nutmegs or in Anatolia receiving coins made of base metal which he
will not be clever enough to pass on."
IV
Lanny sat with Madame Zyszynski, but the results he obtained were not of the best.
Tecumseh, the noble redskin, was suspicious and inclined to be crotchety; he took offense
when one did not accept his word, and Lanny had made the mistake of being too honest. The way
to get results was to be like Parsifal Dingle, who welcomed the spirits quite simply as his friends,
chatting with them and the "control" in an amiable matter-of-fact way. Apparently it was with
the spirits as with healing: except ye be converted, and become as little children! . . .
What Tecumseh would do was to send messages to Lanny through Parsifal. He would say:
"Tell that smart young man that Marcel was here, and that he is painting spirit pictures, much
more wonderful than anything he ever did on earth—but they will never be sold at auctions."
Lanny wanted to know if Marcel objected to having his works sold; but for a long time the
painter ignored his question. Then one day Tecumseh said, rather grudgingly, that it didn't
really matter to Marcel; everything was sold in Lanny's world, and it was no use keeping
beautiful things in a storeroom. This sounded as if the spirit world was acquiring a "pinkish"
tinge.
Madame gave several seances every day. She had done it while she was earning her living on
Sixth Avenue, and insisted that it didn't hurt her. She would accommodate anyone who was
interested, and presently she was delving into the past of the Rabinowich family, telling about
those members who had "passed over." It was a bit unsatisfactory, for there were many
members of that family, and Jascha had lost track of them; he said that he never heard from them
except when someone needed money for some worthy purpose, and all purposes were worthy.
He said that the way to check on the identity of any member of his family in the spirit world
would be that he was asking for money to be given to a son or daughter, a nephew or niece still
on earth!
But there had been indeed an Uncle Nahum, who had peddled goods in Russian-Polish
villages, and had been clubbed to death by the Black Hundreds. The realistic details of this
event sounded convincing to Mama Robin, who had witnessed such an incident as a child and
still had nightmares now and then as a result. Then it was Jascha's own father talking to him;
when he mentioned that his beard had turned white faster on one side than on the other, and
how he had kept his money hidden under a loose brick in the hearth, Lanny saw his urbane host
look startled. Johannes said afterward that he had thought all this must be a fraud of some
sort, but now he didn't know what to think. It was really unthinkable.
So it went on, all over the pleasure vessel. The gray-bearded and heavy-minded Captain
Moeller condescended to try the experiment, and found himself in conversation with his eldest
son, who had been a junior officer on a U-boat, and told how it felt to be suffocated at the
bottom of the sea. Baby Frances's nursemaid, a girl with a Cockney accent who had got a few
scraps of education at a "council school," learned to sit for long periods talking with her father, a
Tommy who had been killed on the Somme, and who told her all about his early life, the name
of the pub where he had made bets on horse races, and where his name was still chalked up on a
board, along with that of other dead soldiers of the neighborhood.
How did Madame Zyszynski get such things? You could say that she sneaked about in the yacht
and caught scraps of conversation, and perhaps rummaged about in people's cabins. But it just
happened that she didn't. She was a rather dull old woman who had been first a servant and
then the wife of the butler to a Warsaw merchant. She suffered from varicose veins and dropsy in
its early stages. She understood foreign languages with difficulty and didn't bother to listen most
of the time, but preferred to sit in her own cabin playing endless games of solitaire. When she
read, it was the pictures in some cheap magazine, and the strange things she did in her trances
really didn't interest her overmuch; she would answer your questions as best she could, but
hardly ever asked any of you. She declared again and again that she did these things because
she was poor and had to earn her living. She insisted, furthermore, that she had never heard
the voice of Tecumseh, and knew about him only what her many clients had told her.
But what a different creature was this Indian chieftain! He was not the Tecumseh of history,
he said, but an Iroquois of the same name. His tribe had been all but wiped out by smallpox.
Now he ruled a tribe of spirits, and amused himself at the expense of his former enemies, the
whites. He was alert, masterful, witty, shrewd— and if there was anything he didn't know, he
would tell you to come back tomorrow and perhaps he would have it for you. But you had to be
polite. You had to treat him as a social equal, and the best way to get along was to be a humble
petitioner. "Please, Tecumseh, see if you can do me this great favor!"
V
What did it all mean? Was this really the spirit of an American aborigine dead more than two
