Listening to Monck’s story, Lanny realized that this had been an oil war. Lack of oil was the reason the mad Führer had had to drop his program of bombing Britain out of the war and to fall back upon a defensive program. He had made the mistake of building too many of his plants in the west and had to build new ones in Silesia and Poland. The plants were the most secret places in Germany, the most carefully camouflaged and most heavily defended. Vital machinery was put under heavy concrete, blast walls were built around the rest, and every plant was surrounded with smoke screens, searchlights, and solid rings of anti-aircraft batteries. This had been a life-or-death war for the Nazis, and they had all known it.
“We got the information,” Monck said quietly, and went on to tell the story of the tremendous Leuna works near this city of Leipzig. The plant had produced more than one-third of all Germany’s aviation and motor gasoline, and during the last year there had been twenty-two knockout air raids upon it. The first, on May 12, 1944, had dropped five hundred tons of bombs and stopped production entirely. But the Germans had their plans to restore full production in a month—“We got a copy of those plans,” said Monck; “I had them in my own hands a week after the raid.”
So the bombers had come again in sixteen days, and this war between destroyers and repairers went on for the full year. At the end of July, after the landing in Normandy and when the rout of Rommel and Rundstedt was beginning, the Leunawerke was hit by nearly three thousand tons of bombs in two days. There had been an attack every fortnight, and nine total knockouts of production. “I have just been looking over the records,” reported the secret agent. “Our bombs caused more than five thousand breaks in pipe-lines at Leuna, and every one of those had to be repaired and fully tested before they could carry the highly inflammable gases and liquids. In the end we had the Nazis reduced to building little plants in the forests, like what you call moonlight stills in America.”
“Moonshine,” corrected Lanny with a smile. “I was told about one in the Black Forest that was run by the power of a steam locomotive. I saw tanks and armored vehicles that had been hauled into the Ardennes by horses and oxen; and they didn’t get out again. Also, there were Tiger tanks that had been fitted with gas generators, to burn charcoal.”
Said Monck, “That was why the Luftwaffe didn’t appear to defend the Rhine; and why the Führer shot himself, and Goebbels and Himmler took poison.”
VIII
Lanny went back in his memory to the books he had read on the subject of psychology. That had been a decade and a half ago, when his stepfather had discovered a spiritualist medium in a tenement on Sixth Avenue in New York, and had become excited about the subject of psychic research. For years after that he had experimented and read the best books he could find. This included several on hypnotism, a powerful weapon which the doctors of an earlier generation had taken seriously but which had dropped out of use, apparently because it took too much time and trouble.
Lanny had the time now and was willing to take the trouble. He arranged to take Marceline into a quiet room and seated her in a chair and tried every way he knew to hypnotize her. He told her to gaze into his eyes, but he found it impossible to fix her attention; she was uneasy and afraid, and her eyes would wander. He tried having her gaze into a pinpoint of light, but encountered the same difficulty. No one can be hypnotized without his or her consent, and he could get no real consent from this shell-shocked mind. The very fears which he was seeking to heal prevented any approach to the healing.
He decided that a new environment might solve the problem, and when she was physically strong enough to be moved he wangled permission for a flight to Paris; that took only about three hours and was not too great a strain. He knew that the hospitals would be crowded, but he got a hotel suite and a nurse to watch over her while he went about the business of begging another plane ride, this time to Cannes. No private motorcar could get gasoline for such a trip, and the trains were slow and irregular and packed to the Very platform steps.
Lanny judged that neither Monuments nor Alsos would be able to help him in a case like this. He went to OSS, a privileged institution, of which few questions were asked. He told his story, and they said it would be necessary to appeal to one of the high brass, and whom did Lanny know here in Paris? When he said that he had served in both the Third and the Seventh, they mentioned that General Patton was in town. Lanny said, “He’s the man!”
IX
No trouble for an assimilated colonel to see Georgie, especially when it had been Lucky Forward which had done the assimilating. They were on terms of banter, for when they had first met the son of Budd-Erling had presumed to tell Georgie it was his duty to take Paris at once, and Georgie had been as mad as hops, and then had had a second thought about it. Now the old boy was sitting on top of this world, but perhaps a trifle bored, there being no longer any new worlds to be conquered. His troubles were far from over, because his Army had been picked to serve as occupation troops, and he and all of his officers were begging to get to Japan. He was always having arguments with SHAEF, and perhaps that was why he had come to Paris now.
He looked old and tired, and Lanny could guess that the strain of the past three or four years had done something to his kidneys. But he stood tall and straight, in a tight-fitting battle jacket with shiny brass buttons and four silver stars on each of his shoulders, and four on each side of his shirt collar; he wore trousers creased to a knife edge and tucked into polished battle boots. He still wore the two pearl-handled revolvers and the swashbuckler’s air, which his high squeaky voice somewhat oddly belied. “Well, Budd,” he said, “what’s biting you now?”
“General,” said Lanny, “you know the services I rendered at Bastogne. And Colonel Koch has twice thanked me for help I gave him, once at Nancy and once at Luxembourg. Now I am asking a favor in return.”
Georgie signed him to a chair, then said, “Shoot!”
“I have a half-sister, Marceline Detaze, daughter of the famous French painter Marcel Detaze. She is twenty-eight, and was a professional dancer. She was caught in Germany. Not quite two years ago I was in Berlin, on a special Intelligence mission for President Roosevelt. Marceline found out that the Nazis had got onto me and risked her life to telephone me to get out, which I did. The scoundrels must have caught her and tried to make her reveal my whereabouts; they knocked out all her teeth, they stuck matches under her fingernails, and they whipped her till her back looks like a washboard. I found her in the Leipzig Lager; they had been working her twelve hours a day in an underground munitions plant. She is a victim of amnesia and doesn’t know who she is or anything about herself.”
“The goddam SOBs!” exclaimed Georgie. He used cavalryman’s language so freely that when he was really mad he had no way to show it but in his face and with the clenching of his hands. “What is it you want?”
“I have got her as far as Paris. I want to take her to our mother, at our home on the Cap d’Antibes. Marceline was born and brought up there, and I have hopes that the familiar scenes may bring her memory back. She has been starved to less than a hundred pounds and she couldn’t stand a train trip. I want to fly her to Cannes. I’m not asking for a special plane; I just want a couple of seats on any plane that’s flying there, and I’m perfectly willing to pay transportation.”
“Nonsense, man; the Army isn’t that hard up. I’m glad you came to me. I’ll have one of my staff men see that it is arranged.” He added, “Never mind the thanks, it’s the Army.” He leaned back in his chair and beamed. “Well, we licked the goddam bastards!”
“You did, General,” said Lanny, who knew the right way to say thanks. “A wonderful thing to see them come pouring in to give up. I was in the heart of what was going to be their Redoubt, and I had a hard time keeping them from surrendering to me.”
“We wouldn’t have minded your having a few. We took more than a million and a quarter.”
“You’ll be interested to know that I had a talk with Göring the night af
ter he came in.”
“That bundle of hogsfat! Tell me about him.” Lanny told that story; then he told how he had become Bürgermeisterstellvertreter of Urach, and Georgie chuckled.
The ex-P.A. knew better than to continue with his own exploits; he asked the two-gun General what had been happening to him, and the squeaky voice turned loose on the “old women at SHAEF,” who had been so timid they wouldn’t let him win the war last winter; at the very end they wouldn’t let him go into Czechoslovakia for fear of displeasing the Russians, and they almost wouldn’t let him go into Austria. The only reason they did was that it was part of the Redoubt and they were afraid the blankety-blanks might hole up there. And now they had turned down his request to be sent to the Pacific. All because of jealousy at headquarters!
When they were parting the tired man said, “My work is done, Budd. The Lord can take me any time.” Lanny remembered the words, and thought of them a few months later when he heard over the radio that the commander of the. Third Army had been killed in a motorcar crash.
X
Lanny succeeded in telephoning his mother to tell her that he was coming. The flight from Paris was without incident, and at the landing field there was Beauty herself with a horse and buggy. The former was experienced and sedate, and the latter had stood in a shed on the estate since the days before motorcars had been invented; they hadn’t even been able to get paint for it until Robbie had mailed them a can from Newcastle. The fine car that Beauty had been driving had been taken by the Légion Tricolore, and what had happened to it they would never know.
Lanny had said over the telephone, “Don’t kiss her, for that may frighten her. Don’t show any emotion, just be gentle and quiet.” So Beauty blinked the tears out of her eyes—she had been prepared, but the reality was beyond imagining. She drove, and Marceline was helped into the seat beside her, and then Lanny climbed in beside Marceline. There wasn’t enough of her to crowd them.
The nag ambled along, and it took them nearly an hour to get to Bienvenu, a drive which they had been accustomed to make by car in six or seven minutes. They talked about the beautiful day, the wide spacious Boulevard de la Croisette with its rows of palm trees, the blue waters of the Golfe Juan, the swarms of GIs filling all the fashionable hotels, the buildings which had been damaged and were now nearly all repaired. Topics like that, harmless, and likely to bring back memory; but all the time Marceline said not a word. She had been told that this was her mother, but the statement meant nothing to her, and if she had ever swum in these blue waters or sailed over them she did not know or care.
It was the same with the white-haired old gentleman of seventy and the dark-haired little boy of seven. The strange situation had been made known to the child; his mother, of whom he had no recollection, had lost her recollection of him; he must be gentle and quiet with her and help her get well. Since he was gentle and quiet by nature, this was not difficult. He took seriously his duties as assistant nurse. He had been impressed by the information that she had been almost starved to death and that food would help to restore her to a more agreeable aspect. He would sit and watch every spoonful that she put into her mouth.
For Parsifal Dingle this was a situation made to order. He was like the Catholic priests in Dachau: he had been in training for the job. His benevolent aspect impressed the sick woman at once; he was a man of God, and he wasted no time in preliminaries but took a seat before her and began to explain his faith. She, Marceline Detaze, was God’s perfect child, and all she had to do was to put her faith in Him, and He would restore her to peace and happiness. Parsifal did not undertake to explain why God had let her get into her present state, or why He had created, or permitted to come into existence, those fiends in human form who had brought her there. The problem of evil and how it comes to be is one which has baffled the world’s greatest philosophers, and what Parsifal Dingle did was to ignore it. God knew the answer, and perhaps in His good time would reveal it. What Parsifal had to do was to turn evil into good, a power which God gave him and for which he was duly grateful.
So, day and night, he recited the prayers which he had composed for the help of other suffering persons and which now had become routine. Monotony did not trouble him, and the idea of boredom did not occur to him, for this was the presence of God. He did not tell God what to do, or even ask; he told Marceline what God could and would do, because God was good and could do nothing else. He told her that God was the living Principle that had made her and sustained her, and if she had faith in this certainty the process of restoration would go on and she would have peace and health and happiness. He told her that God would cast out her fears if she would believe that He would do it. She, being docile, believed it, and it happened. A little boy sat by, listening and watching with his wide dark eyes, deeply stirred, because this was the first miracle he had seen. He was told that his presence was important, for Jesus had said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
XI
Laurel came, having got all the material she needed, and being glad of a place where she could sit in the sun with a writing pad on her knee. Laurel had never been religious, but this was a new kind of religion, something which could be taken as psychology. If faith healed as Parsifal had insisted he had been proving for thirty years, was it not advisable for men and women to acquire some? It was, the old gentleman insisted, something different from reason; it was something that you proved by experiment. You had faith in peace and you had peace; you had faith in health and you had health.
Up to a certain point it worked admirably with Marceline. She was getting confidence and was restoring her starved tissues. In this household where only love was spoken she came to feel at home and accepted their statement that this was her family and the house in which she had been born and raised. She never went away from the house; she stayed in her room when strangers came, which happened seldom because transportation was so difficult to get. She would knit or she would do any household task that was set before her. Only now and then was there a relapse, as when a thunderstorm caused her to crawl under the bed and refuse to come out. Apparently God was not in the thunder.
But no effort had any effect upon her memory; no suggestion and no prayers could carry her back behind that curtain which had fallen in the Leipzig Lager. Lanny tried again and again to hypnotize her; he was sure that if he could plant the suggestion that her memory would return it would happen. But his best efforts failed; the fears still blocked the way.
Then he bethought himself of an idea which had occurred to him many years ago, that it might be possible to implant suggestions during normal sleep; he had tried several experiments, but the monotony had bored him—he lacked his stepfather’s firm conviction that God was speaking through his voice. But now, apparently, this idea had occurred to others; Lanny had read an item to the effect that the Army was dealing with shell-shock cases by means of suggestion implanted by a phonograph record played while the patient slept. They had a device to make radio records audible under the pillows of airplane pilots in training, and when they woke up in the morning they knew their lessons. If the Army was doing such things, that made them respectable.
Lanny searched in the attic of this villa for a phonograph he had used in giving dance lessons to Marceline and young Freddi and other children. It had a device which shifted the needle and played the same record over and over as long as you wanted; it was run by electricity, so that it could keep going all night. Lanny dusted it off and made sure it was in order; then, with Parsifal’s help, he composed a spiel. He rode in a crowded bus to the city of Nice where there was a recording studio; he had a twelve-inch recording made and tried out, and took it home and tried it there, and let Marceline hear it, so that it would not make her uneasy.
After that she went to sleep every night to the sound of Lanny’s voice murmuring gently, and all night long it continued to murmur reassuring suggestions. “I am your brother, Lanny Budd, and I love y
ou and want to help you. You will remember me, and how I taught you to swim and dance and play tennis. Beauty is your mother, and she loves you, and you will remember all the kind things she did for you. Your father was Marcel Detaze, and you will remember his beautiful paintings. Little Marcel is your son; you will remember how he was born and how happy you were with him. Parsifal is your other father; he loves you, and you will remember how he taught you. Laurel is your sister, and she loves you too. Bienvenu is your home, and you will recall your childhood here and all your friends and the happy times you had. Everybody here loves you and wants to help you, and you will trust them and remember all your happiness …”
And so on and on. To have had a human voice repeating that for eight hours would have been a great strain upon the voice, but it didn’t worry the phonograph a bit, and it didn’t use up much of the scarce electrical power of the Midi. Nor did it trouble Marceline’s sleep; she had been brought to the point where she wanted to remember these agreeable things that were told to her. Her past life had become a sort of fairy tale, to which she listened gladly and asked questions. After the treatment had continued for two or three weeks she began to exclaim, “I believe I remember that!”
How could they be sure? They had told her much. But the day came when she cried: “Oh, I remember Vittorio! He was such a horrid man!” Then they knew that the suggestions were really taking effect, for they had agreed never to mention her divorced husband—he being one of the painful memories which might cause her to shrink away from her past.
Memories did not come in a rush, but little by little; and perhaps that was just as well. She was getting back her interest in life, she was learning to live in this new-old world and be useful in it, much more so than she had been in the past, for she had been a self-centered person, ravenous for pleasure and praise. The day before Lanny and Laurel went away he tried a fascinating experiment. The radio was playing Tales of the Vienna Woods, and he took her hands and began to lead her gently into a waltz. The result was amazing; she began to follow his steps, and a light of happiness came into her eyes. “Oh, I know how to dance!” she exclaimed.