When they reached home there were Rick and Nina, and the way they greeted their son showed the love they had in their hearts. A wonderful thing to have him here, safe and alive, after so many dangers, swooping and diving in the sky like a swallow, but many times faster, and pursued by deadly hawks! Being wise parents, they did not take long to realize what was going on in the heart of this lovely young girl. They were not worldly persons, but they were running an institution and could not be unaware of the existence of money. Having a sense of humor, they could not fail to smile over the idea of the Barnes fortune or any part of it joining the Peace Program. They would put their son to work and would take Lanny’s daughter to their hearts and teach her all they could—and let Irma and Ceddy learn to like it.
VII
Here was a family group of eight persons, including Freddi Robin, and Gerald, who proceeded promptly to fall in love with Frances. She had no eyes for him, so he would have a broken heart; but he would be decent about it and drown his sorrows in work for the cause. The orders were pouring in, and the little paper was booming. After Frances had been taken up to Newcastle and had spent a few days there, meeting all her old friends and playing around—sailing boats, swimming, playing tennis, and motoring about the countryside—she suddenly decided that what she liked best was being with that exciting Peace Group, learning all about the radio business, and how to paste up the proofs of a newspaper; reading her father’s fan mail and learning to answer it, and meeting all those intellectual people who came to dinner. Not forgetting, of course, that Scrubbie was there!
It made a happy family. There was Lanny Junior, going on five years, running about and getting into everything. All summer he would be in the garden, and in the winter he would be taken every morning to kindergarten. Laurel was going to have another baby, to provide a playmate for the first; also she was planning a book setting forth how democratic Socialism would work, in spite of all the hired writers who insisted it must lead to dictatorship. Free, voluntary, co-operative social ownership, such as Lanny had explained to Stalin—but, alas, Stalin hadn’t seemed to learn. The Russians went right on with their tough program, their party line, called dictatorship of the proletariat, but really dictatorship over the proletariat.
However, somebody else had learned! That man of the people, that farm boy who had plowed a straight furrow, that prototype of all Middle Westerners—Harry S Truman had listened to what his P.A. had told him about the difference between public ownership under a dictatorship and the same under a genuine and alert democracy. The day came when the little family sat by the radio, listening to the President of the United States discussing the subject of atomic power and who was to own and control it. They heard him say, “This discovery was paid for with the people’s money; it belongs to the people, and I intend to see that it is kept for the people.”
When that speech was finished Laurel Creston had a light of glory in her eyes. She turned to Rick, exclaiming:
“The shepherd speaks!”
Appendix
World’s End Impending
When the first volume of the Lanny Budd series, World’s End, was accepted by the Literary Guild as its selected book for July 1940, the author was asked to prepare a statement for publication in the Guild’s monthly bulletin, Wings. The statement is here reprinted, in this, the tenth and I hope final volume of the series. At that time the author had no idea that he had committed himself to nine additional years of hard labor; in fact, he thought that Volume One was the complete story. But the characters in it thought otherwise and insisted upon continuing.
Fate has put you and me upon the earth in one of the critical periods of human history; a dangerous time, but exciting—and certainly there has never been a time when it has been possible for the ordinary person to know so much about what is going on. The field is so enormous, the issues so crucial, that I, as a novelist, have for years been running away from them. I have said, “I am an American, and America is enough for me.” So I wrote Oil!, dealing with one industry in my home neighborhood; and Boston, dealing with the Sacco-Vanzetti case; and Co-op, portraying the unemployed of my state and their efforts to establish self-help groups.
But all the time I was watching world events and hearing stories, and I suppose that whoever or whatever it is that works in the subconscious mind of a novelist was having his or her or its way with me; the big theme was stalking me and was bound to catch up. I saw the rise of Mussolini, and of Hitler, and of Franco; the dreadful agony of Spain wrung my heart; then I saw Munich, and said to myself, “This is the end; the end of our world.”
I was walking up and down in my garden one night, and something happened; a spring was touched, a button pressed—anyhow, a novel came rolling into the field of my mental vision; a whole series of events, with the emotions that accompanied them, a string of characters, good and bad, old and young, rich and poor. I have had that happen to me before, but never with such force, such mass and persistence. There was no resisting it, and I didn’t try. I spent the next thirty-six hours in a state of absorption. I slept little, but lay in bed and “saw” that theme; I ate little and talked little—I have a kind and long-suffering wife, and when I tell her what is happening to me she lets it happen. I trod the garden path hard under my feet, and filled sheets of paper with notes of characters, places, events—the whole panorama of World’s End. Ultimately I had nearly a hundred typewritten pages of notes, a small book in themselves.
I am one of the fortunate ones in this land of ours. I live where the sun shines most all of most days, and in the morning I can take my typewriter out into the garden. I can wear a pair of bathing trunks and a white canvas hat while I walk up and down behind jasmine and rose hedges with the people of my books as they live their adventures and say their say. I suppose a psychologist would describe what goes on in the mind of a novelist as controlled multiple personality. These imaginary persons are more real to me than the people I meet in the outside world, for the latter keep me guessing, whereas the former are my grown-up children; they do what they please, and while they often take me by surprise, I am able to understand them instantly.
In a historical novel like World’s End I cannot, of course, leave everything to my imaginary characters. I have to spend a part of my day reading books to refresh their memory as to places and events. In the evening, propped up in bed, I revise the morning’s manuscript, or stroll in the garden and invite the next chapter to unroll itself. This, I take it, is the ideal life for the writer. Sticking to it, day in and day out, rarely seeing anybody or going anywhere, I can produce a thousand words a day, and at the end of a full year I have a thousand pages. It is the hardest kind of work, yet also the most delightful play. The end and goal of it all is you, the reader, and the day when you sit down and open the new book, my heart is in my mouth.
The scene of World’s End is Europe, with a visit to New England and New York. The time is 1913 to 1919. I lived in England, Holland, Germany, France, and Italy during 1912 and 1913, and naturally my thoughts were there during the warmaking and the peacemaking. Also, the records are voluminous. For World’s End I must have read a hundred books and consulted several times as many.
I could not write a novel about Europeans, except as subordinate characters. Most of the people in World’s End are Americans living in Europe; I have known many of these, and new ones come calling and refresh my memory. If there was a place I wanted to know about, I could find someone who had been there; if there was an event I had to describe, I could find someone who had witnessed it. First and last I must have written several hundred letters and asked a thousand questions.
Of course there will be some slips, as I know from experience; but World’s End is meant to be history as well as fiction, and I am sure there are no mistakes of importance. I have my own point of view, but I have tried to play fair in this book. There is a varied cast of characters and they say what they think.
Some of them are real persons, living or dead. George Bernar
d Shaw stood with me and my family on the “bright meadow,” with the sunshine glinting in his whiskers as I have described him—or rather, to be exact, the description is my wife’s. We were as happy as children at that “Dalcroze” festival—although I knew that the war was coming and took my son out of school in Germany for that reason. In the opening pages of World’s End as I wrote them originally, there was more about the Orpheus dancing, but some of my friends persuaded me that a descent into hell was a misleading opening for a realistic novel. Whether they were right I shall never be sure.
Isadora Duncan I met in her prime, when she carried her magic with her into everyday life. Anatole France and Rodin I never met, but the records concerning them are detailed. Zaharoff was known to friends of mine, and the stories they tell about him are even stranger than the ones I have used in World’s End. Woodrow Wilson I once watched in action. George D. Herron and Lincoln Steffens were among my oldest friends, and their widows have checked me on various details.
The Peace Conference of Paris, which is the scene of the-last third of World’s End, is of course one of the great events of all time. A friend of mine asked an authority on modern fiction the question: “Has anybody ever used the Peace Conference in a novel?” And the reply was: “Could anybody?” Well, I thought somebody could, and now I think somebody has. The reader will ask, and I state explicitly that so far as concerns historic characters and events my picture is correct in all details. This part of the manuscript, 374 pages, was read and checked by eight or ten gentlemen who were on the American staff at the Conference. Several of these now hold important positions in the world of troubled international affairs; others are college presidents and professors, and I promised them all that their letters would be confidential. Suffice it to say that the errors they pointed out were corrected, and where they disagreed, both sides have a word in the book.
The story of the German secret agent in Paris and the love story which is woven through these scenes are of course fictional. But I knew of a story not so different—amor inter arma; and it happens that an old friend of mine had much the same experience with the Paris police as befalls my hero. The glimpses of world revolution and its makers which I give you are from firsthand knowledge, for many of these men and women have been my friends since youth; they know that I respect their sincerity even when I do not agree with their tactics. This may sound suspicious to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, but it is useful to a novelist.
Now this offering of my spirit has been brought to maturity and goes out to you, my fellow citizens of a world on fire. John Milton wrote, with no false modesty: “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” I make no such claim for World’s End, but I can say that I have put into it the best spirit I have; also whatever of knowledge of the human heart, of the world we live in, and of the future we are helping to make. Will it be the good life for which the saints have pleaded, or the “World’s End,” by fire and sword, which the prophet Isaiah predicted more than twenty-five centuries ago?
The above was written in 1940. Since then there have been nine years of continuous hard work, and nine more large volumes, which have been or are being translated and published in twenty-one foreign lands. They have received some adverse criticism, and cordial praise from such contemporaries as Gandhi, G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and Theodore Dreiser. They have given pleasure and instruction to millions of people, and have brought thousands of letters of friendship and thanks. While these words are being typed, there comes a report from the small islands of Japan that the books are being advertised there on billboards and in streetcars, and that in three months the sales of Dragon’s Teeth have almost equaled those in the United States in seven years. To some highbrow critics I repeat a challenge which I have issued several times before: name an American writer who achieved world fame during his lifetime and whose reputation has not held up since his death. That challenge has never been taken up.
The critics really do not matter; they are a small group which writes for a small audience. The reading masses have found interest plus information in the Lanny Budd books, and I tell them that they may trust the information, for I have done everything in my power to get the facts exactly right. A few errors of petty detail have been pointed out and corrected, but no critic or historian has ever pointed out a serious error in these books.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Lanny Budd Novels
1 THE CONSTANT SERVICE
I
A philosopher stood at the microphone of a radio station, a place to which philosophers are not often enough invited. He was a rather small man, slender and spry despite the fact that he was approaching his seventy-fifth birthday; he had a brick-red complexion, an elfish expression, and an abundance of white hair brushed back. He was, by accident, an English earl; he did not believe in aristocracy and preferred to drop the title, but among the Americans who dearly love a lord, he could not escape from it.
He was telling some millions of Americans the ideas which his seventy-five years had brought to him. He said, ‘So long as the human race is divided into two halves, each of which thinks the other half wicked, it can be plausibly maintained that it is everybody’s duty to cause suffering. If such a view is not to prevail, it will be necessary that our moral outlook should become more kindly than it has hitherto been, and that we should cease to find pleasure in thinking of this world as a vale of tears’.
He went on to explain, ‘We live in a moment of strange conflict. The human heart has changed little since the dawn of history, but the human mastery over nature has changed completely. Our passions, our desires, our fears are still those of the cave man, but our power to realise our wishes is something radically new. Man must face the painful truth: that disaster to his neighbour whom he hates is not likely to bring happiness to himself whom he loves. If a man is to live with the new powers that he has acquired he must grow up not only in his mind but in his heart’.
The speaker concluded and stepped aside; another and younger man took his place and spoke into the microphone. ‘This concludes the Peace Programme. This programme is conducted by the Peace Group, an endowed institution that aims at the prevention of the next world war. Our speaker was Bertrand Russell, Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and mathematician. Turn to this programme one week from tonight at the same hour. The address of the Peace Group is Box one thousand, Edgemere, New Jersey. This is Lanny Budd speaking. Good night’.
The operator in the control room shut off the microphone, and the middle-aged announcer turned to the elderly guest. ‘A most interesting talk, Lord Russell’, he began. But that was as far as he got; a secretary came, saying, ‘Telephone, Lord Russell’, and then, ‘Telephone, Mr Budd’. It was always that way the moment a programme ended. There were half a dozen telephones in booths, and they would all begin ringing at once.
But it wasn’t a fan this time, at least not on Lanny’s call. A voice said, ‘Is this Mr Lanning Prescott Budd?’ When he answered, the voice said, ‘This is John Turner of the U.S. Secret Service, Washington office. Do you recognise the name Braun, spelled B-r-a-u-n?’
Lanny said, ‘I know such a man. He has other names’.
‘I will give one of them, Vetterl’.
‘Yes, that is the man. I know him’.
‘We have just received a code cablegram asking us to contact you about a matter of importance. Would it be convenient for you to come to Washington?’
‘I have always honoured his requests’, Lanny said. ‘Will tomorrow afternoon be time enough?’
‘We will expect you tomorrow afternoon’, was the reply. ‘We will, of course, take care of your expense account. I will make a reservation for you at the Shoreham’.
Lanny hung up; and right away there was another call for him, and then another and another. The fans never let up for an hour or two. The announcer was busy, the speaker was busy, the announcer’s
wife was busy, and so were several of the assistants. People wanted to congratulate, they wanted to ask what they could do, they wanted to order copies of the little weekly paper called Peace; they wanted to ask questions or tell their ideas about how to bring peace to the world and keep it. They were all well meaning, but not all were competent, and you had to be of a patient disposition in order to keep at this crusader’s job, as Lanny and Laurel Budd and their friends had been doing for what seemed a long time. They had started in the autumn of 1945, and now it was October of 1946.
Laurel was expecting her second baby in a couple of months, but that had not kept her from sitting most of the day at a desk or lying on a daybed reading mail, dictating replies, and receiving visitors from all over the country and from other parts of the world. An unused factory building had been made over into a radio studio, the publishing and editorial rooms of a weekly paper, and the office of a newspaper syndicate. There was always more work than the staff could do. The harvest was plentiful and the labourers were few.
II
They drove the honoured guest to their home, where he was to spend the night; and only after they had bestowed him did Lanny tell about the special telephone call. Laurel’s face fell and she exclaimed, ‘Oh dear!’ They are going to take you away again!’
‘I can’t tell’, Lanny said, ‘until I have talked with the man. Perhaps it’s only information he wants’. He said no more, for a confidential agent does not talk about his affairs even to the wife he loves and trusts; the wife spares him the embarrassment of having to refuse. ‘I thought of motoring’, he added, ‘so you can come along. You need a change, and we can talk about our problems’. They were kept so busy with routine jobs that they had little time for the larger planning.