What did it all mean? Was this really the spirit of an American aborigine dead more than two
hundred years? Lanny didn't think so. After reading a number of books and pondering over it
for months, he had decided that Tecumseh was a genius; something of the sort which had
worked in William Shakespeare, producing a host of characters which the world accepted as
more real than living people. In the case of the poet, this genius had been hitched up with his
conscious mind, so that the poet knew what it was doing and could put the characters into
plays and sell them to managers. But the genius in Madame Zyszynski wasn't hitched up; it
stayed hidden in her unconscious and worked there on its own; a wild genius, so to speak, a
subterranean one. What, old mole, work'st i' the earth so fast!
This energy played at being an Indian; also it gathered facts from the minds of various persons
and wove stories out of them. It dipped into the subconscious mind of Lanny Budd and collected
his memories and made them into the spirit of Marcel Detaze, painting pictures on the Cap
d'Antibes or looking at ruins in ancient Greece. It dipped into the mind of Jascha Rabinowich
and created the spirits of his relatives. Like children finding old costumes in a trunk, putting
them on and making up stories about people they have heard of or read of in books—people
alive or dead! Every child knows that you have to pretend that it's true, otherwise it's no fun,
the imagination doesn't work. If you put on a bearskin, get down on your hands and knees
and growl. If you put on the headdress of an Indian chieftain, stalk about the room and
command the other children in a deep stern voice—even if it has a Polish accent!
All this seemed to indicate that there was some sort of universal pool of mindstuff, an ocean
in which Lanny's thoughts and Madame Zyszynski's and other people's merged and flowed
together. Figure yourself as a bubble floating on the surface of an ocean; the sun shines on you
and you have very lovely colors; other bubbles float near, and you come together and form a
cluster of bubbles—the guests of the yacht Bessie Budd, for example. One by one the bub bles
break, and their substance returns to the ocean, and in due course becomes the
substance of new bubbles.
This theory obliged you to believe that a medium had the power to dip into this mind
substance and get facts to which the medium did not have access in any normal way. Was
it easier to believe that than to believe that the spirits of dead persons were sending
communications to the living? Lanny found it so; for he had lived long enough to watch
the human mind develop along with the body and to decay along with it. In some strange
way the two seemed to be bound together and to share the same fate. But don't fool
yourself into thinking that you knew what the nature of that union was; how a thought
could make a muscle move, or how a chemical change in the body could produce cheerful
or depressed thoughts. Those questions were going to take wiser men than Lanny Budd
to answer them; he kept wishing that people would stop robbing and killing one another
and settle down to this task of finding out what they really were.
VI
The hundred-dollar-an-hour cruise was continued eastward, and presently they were
approaching the Peninsula of Gallipoli, where so many Englishmen had paid with their
lives for the blundering of their superiors. Great ships had gone down, and the beaches
had been piled with mangled bodies. Among the many wounded had been the father of
Lanny's amie, Rosemary Codwilliger, Countess of Sandhaven. He had "passed over" not
long ago, and Lanny wondered, did his spirit haunt this place? He asked Tecumseh about
it, and it wasn't long before Colonel Codwilliger was "manifesting"; but unfortunately
Lanny hadn't known him very well, and must write to Rosemary in the Argentine to find
out if the statements were correct.
They passed through the Dardanelles on a gusty, rainy afternoon, and the shores
looked much like any other shores veiled in mist. Lanny and Bess walked for a while on
deck, and then went into the saloon and played the Schubert four-hand piano sonata.
Then Lanny came out again, for somewhere ahead was the Island of Prinkipo which had
been so much in his thoughts at the Peace Conference eleven years before. It had been chosen
as the place for a meeting with the Bolsheviks, in President Wilson's effort to patch up a truce
with them. The elder statesmen had found it difficult to believe there existed a place with such
a musical-comedy name.
It might as well have been a musical-comedy performance—such was Lanny's bitter reflection.
The statesmen didn't go to Prinkipo, and when later they met the Russians at Genoa they didn't
settle anything. They went home to get ready for another war—Lanny was one of those
pessimistic persons who were sure it was on the way. He told people so, and they would shrug
their shoulders. What could they do about it? What could anybody do? C'est la nature!
Perhaps it was the rain which caused these melancholy thoughts; perhaps the spirits of those
tens of thousands of dead Englishmen and Turks; or perhaps of the dogs of Constantinople,
which during the war had been gathered up and turned loose on this musical- comedy island to
starve and devour one another. Under the religion of the country it was not permitted to kill
them, so let them eat one another! The Prophet, born among a nomadic people, had loved the
dog and praised it as the guardian of the tent; he had endeavored to protect it, but had not been
able to foresee great cities with swarms of starveling curs and a denouement of cannibalism.
The southern hills of this Sea of Marmora had been the scene of events about which Lanny had
heard his father talking with Zaharoff. The munitions king had financed the invasion of Turkey
by his fellow-Greeks, spending half his fortune on it, so he had said— though of course you
didn't have to assume that everything he said was true. Anyhow, the Greeks had been routed
and hosts of them driven into the sea, after which the victorious Turkish army had appeared
before the British fortifications and the guns of the fleet. This critical situation had brought
about the fall of the Lloyd George government and thus played hob with the plans of Robbie
Budd for getting oil concessions. Robbie was one of those men who use governments, his own
and others', threatening wars and sometimes waging them; while Lanny was an amiable
playboy who traveled about on a hundred-dollar-an-hour yacht, making beautiful music,
reading books of history and psychic research, and being troubled in his conscience about the
way the world was going. He asked his friends very earnestly what ought to be done. Some thought
they knew; but the trouble was, their opinions differed so greatly;
VII
The company went ashore in the crowded city, which had once been the capital of the Moslem
world, and now was known as Istanbul. They got cars, as usual, and were driven about to see
the sights. They visited the great cathedral of St. Sophia, and in the seraglio of the late sultan
they inspected the harem, in which now and then a faithless wife had been strangled with a
cord, tied in a sack, and set afloat in the Bosporus. They strolled through the bazaars, where
traders of various races labored diligently to sell them souvenirs, from Bergama rugs to "feelthy
postcards." Through the crowded street came a fire-engine with a great clangor; a modern one,
painted a brilliant red—but Lanny saw in imagination the young Zaharoff riding the machine,
busy with schemes to collect for his services. Were they still called tulumbadschi? And did
they still charge to put out your fire—or to let it burn, as you preferred?
The unresting Bessie Budd stole northward along the coast of the immensely deep Black
Sea, called by the ancient Greeks "friendly to strangers." The Soviet Union was in the middle of
the Five-Year Plan, and miracles were confidently expected. The travelers' goal was Odessa, a
city with a great outdoor stairway which they had seen in a motion picture. Their passports had
been visaed and everything arranged in advance; they had only to make themselves known to
Intourist, and they would have automobiles and guides and hotels to the limit of their supply of
valuta.
"I have seen the future and it works." So Lincoln Steffens had said to Lanny Budd. Stef had
had the eyes of faith, and so had Hansi and Bess and Rahel. When they looked at buildings
much in need of repair and people wearing sneakers and patched sweaters, they said: "Wait till
the new factories get going." They told the girl guides that they were "comrades," and they
were taken off to in spect the latest styles in day nurseries and communal kitchens. They were
motored into the country to visit a co-operative farm; when Hansi was asked about his
occupation at home, he admitted that he was a violinist, and the people rushed to provide an
instrument. All work on the place stopped while he stood on the front porch and played Old
Folks at Home and Kathleen Mavourneen and Achron's Hebrew Melody. It was heart-warming;
but would it help get tractors and reapers into condition for the harvest soon to be due?
VIII
Irma went on some of these expeditions, and listened politely to the enthusiasms of her
friends; but to Mama Robin she confessed that she found "the future" most depressing. Mama
shrugged her shoulders and said: "What would you expect? It's Russia." She had learned about it
as a child, and didn't believe it could ever be changed. In the days of the Tsar people had been
so unhappy they had got drunk and crawled away into some hole to sleep. The Bolsheviks had
tried to stop the making of liquor, but the peasants had made it and smuggled it into the towns
—"just like in America," said Mama. She would have preferred not to have these painful old
memories revived.
Odessa had changed hands several times during the revolution and civil war. It had been
bombarded by the French fleet, and many of its houses destroyed. One of the sights of the city
was the Square of the Victims, where thousands of slain revolutionists had been buried in a
common grave, under a great pyramid of stones. The young people went to it as to a shrine,
while their elders sought entertainment without success. The young ones insisted upon
visiting some of the many sanatoriums, which are built near bodies of water formed by silted-
up river mouths. These too were shrines, because they were occupied by invalided workers.
That was the way it was going to be in the future; those who produced the wealth would
enjoy it! "They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat."
Thus the ancient Hebrew prophet, and it sounded so Red that in Canada a clergyman had
been indicted by the grand jury for quoting it. Hansi and Rahel had the blood of these ancient
prophets in their veins, and Bess had been taught that their utterances were the word of God,
so this new religion came easily to them. It promised to save the workers, and Lanny hoped it
would have better success than Mohammed had had in his efforts to help the watch-dogs of the
tents.
Lanny was in his usual position, between the two sets of extremists. During this Russian visit
he served as a sort of liaison officer to the Robin family. Johannes didn't dare to discuss
Communism with any of his young people, for he had found that by doing so he injured his
standing; he talked with Lanny, hoping that something could be done to tone them down. In
the opinion of the man of money, this Bolshevik experiment was surviving on what little fat it
had accumulated during the old regime. People could go on living in houses so long as they
stood up, and they could wear old clothes for decades if they had no sense of shame—look about
you! But the making of new things was something else again. Of course, they could hire foreign
experts and have factories built, and call it a Five-Year Plan—but who was going to do any real
work if he could put it off on somebody else? And how could any business enterprise be run by
politicians? "You don't know them," said Johannes, grimly. "In Germany I have had to."
"It's an experiment," Lanny admitted. "Too bad it had to be tried in such a backward
country."
"All I can say," replied the man of affairs, "is I'm hoping it doesn't have to be tried in any
country where I live!"
IX
This was a situation which had been developing in the Robin family for many years, ever
since Barbara Pugliese and Jesse Black-less had explained the ideals of proletarian revolution
to the young Robins in Lanny's home: an intellectual vaccination which had taken with
unexpected virulence. Lanny had watched with both curiosity and concern the later
unfoldment of events. He knew how Papa and Mama Robin adored their two boys,
centering all their hopes upon them. Papa made money in order that Hansi and Freddi
might be free from the humiliations and cares of poverty. Papa and Mama watched their
darlings with solicitude, consulting each other as to their every mood and wish. Hansi
wanted to play the fiddle; very well, he should be a great musician, with the best
teachers, everything to make smooth his path. Freddi wished to be a scholar, a learned
person; very well, Papa would pay for everything, and give up his natural desire to have
the help of one of his sons in his own business.
It had seemed not surprising that young people should be set afire with hopes of
justice for the poor, and the ending of oppression and war. Every Jew in the world knows
that his ancient prophets proclaimed such a millennium, the coming of such a Messiah.
If Hansi and Freddi were excessive in their fervor, well, that was to be expected at their
age. As they grew older, they would acquire discretion and learn what was possible in
these days. The good mother and the hard-driving father waited for this, but waited in
