A gangway was brought for them to descend on, and presently an official came who spoke a little English. Lanny produced his credentials, in the form of the telegram from Kuibvshev instructing him to come here. The official knew nothing about it, but since they were Americans it was doubtless all right. Americans were a privileged people, likely to drop down out of any sky; and now they were allies in the war on the Hitlerite bandits. “Amerikansky tovarische” would get them anything they wanted in the People’s Revolutionary Republic of Outer Mongolia.
Lanny put presents into the young pilots’ hands and thanked them in the name of the people’s cause. Farewells were said, and then the travelers were put into a much-worn car and driven to a government office where they told their story. No instructions had come, but they wrote a telegram to Uncle Jesse, and doubtless others were sent by the officials. Meantime the Americans were put up in a reasonably clean hotel room, and made the discovery which has become legendary among Americans traveling in Sovietland—the plumbing didn’t work. Lanny said it wouldn’t matter so much with Mongolians, for he had been told that they were the least-washed people in the world; water was applied to them only twice in a lifetime, first when they were born and second when they got married.
Naturally the couple wanted to see all they could of this unexpected new city of Central Asia. Ulan-Bator Khoto means “Red Knight City”; before that it had been Urga, the palace, the holy place, residence of the Living Buddha. When the last one had died, the Soviets had not permitted the customary reincarnation to occur, and the former residence had become a museum. The desire of the Amerikansky to view it was appreciated. They would have a “guide,” who would also be a police guard, but that wouldn’t trouble them, since they had nothing to hide. He was a yellow man, but politically Red, and knew a few words of what he thought was English and used over and over.
Later, when the authorities got word from Kuibyshev, they realized that they had important visitors and supplied them with an “intellectual, a young woman of Mongolian race who had studied English in Moscow and now served as translator in one of the offices of what she insisted was the entirely autonomous People’s government. She wanted to show them every modern improvement in the community, including the university, the veterinary college, the medical college, and the wonderful theater with the revolving stage; she appeared chagrined when they told her that they had seen such things in America, and that after the museum they most desired to visit a real yurt and see how the primitive Mongols lived. Milk and curds were their food, together with blood which they drew from the legs of living cattle and horses and drank while it was warm. They bundled up their babies, all but a small opening at each end, and never unbundled them except as they grew and needed a larger chrysalis.
She took her charges out into the desert and showed them not merely a group of yurts, but also a high school, including a snow-covered spot which she said had been a truck garden, and would be again. “They even had flowers,” she remarked, proudly; and Lanny quoted to her: “The desert shall rejoice, and blossom like the rose.” She thought that was lovely, and asked who had said it. When he told her Isaiah, she looked blank and asked: “Who is he?” When the visitor replied: “He is one of the prophets in the Jewish Old Testament,” she was disconcerted. He told her: “You ought to look into them; you’d be surprised to see what good comrades they were!”
VII
Instructions came: the travelers were to be flown to Ulan-Ude, a station on the Trans-Siberian railway, where they would be picked up by a westbound passenger plane. They were back in civilization; there was a regular airline between the two Ulans—Mongolian for Reds. The plane would be heated, so they would no longer have to wonder if they were going to freeze to death in a storm. If you think you don’t like civilization, just get out of its reach for a few weeks!
In Ulan-Ude they had to wait, and nobody could say for how long. The Soviet Union at war could not spare a plane to transport private passengers a distance of four thousand miles, and there were no commercial planes anywhere within its borders. Here everything was concentrated upon the one task of repelling the Hitlerite invader. (That was the name they gave him, the worst name they could think of; as a rule they reserved the name “German” for the “people,” with whom they insisted they had no quarrel.)
Machinery had been brought here from the western front; brick factory buildings were arising, and soon products would be pouring forth. What the products would be nobody told the travelers, and it was not good form to ask. They were guests of the local soviet, and were taken about and shown all the modern improvements. Lanny found a bookstore and obtained a pocket dictionary, and they diligently studied the more important words—those which had to do with something to eat.
During this period of leisure Lanny told his wife the words she had spoken while over the Gobi desert. She was deeply shocked, and tears ran down her cheeks. “Oh, Lanny, those poor people! How perfectly dreadful!”
“Don’t forget, dear, it may not be true. It may have been just a bad dream.”
“I believe it is true,” she declared. “I don’t have any idea how it happens, but I have become convinced that my mind gets things. And that sounds so like Lizbeth. Poor child!”
She made Lanny repeat every word that he remembered; and then, of course, she wanted to try another séance. They did so; but the effort produced only Otto Kahn and his playful courtesy—he said he didn’t have the pleasure of the young lady’s acquaintance, and in the spirit world no gentleman would speak to a lady without a proper introduction. Laurel tried half a dozen times, but her husband never again heard the gentle voice of the girl from the Green Spring Valley.
VIII
There came a westbound transport plane with two vacant seats, and at a half-hour’s notice the passengers were hustled on board. Now they had comfortable seats, and presently were flying over the wide Lake Baikal—only they couldn’t see it, because all the curtains were drawn. That was the case whenever they were passing over military secrets. Lanny guessed that it might be the new railroad which had been built around the foot of the lake; in the old days there had been a great ferry, and passenger and freight cars had had to be shuttled across. They could talk now, because this was a passenger plane, with sound-absorbing walls; their seats were side by side, and they did not get acquainted with the other passengers, most of whom were in uniform. One was a prisoner, handcuffed to his guard. They did not ask what he had done.
All day they were privileged to look at the snowbound wastes of Siberia, with a few towns, all with factory chimneys smoking. At nightfall they came to Irkutsk, but didn’t see anything of it, because the curtains again were drawn. At the airport they had only time for a meal, and to stretch their legs, and then they were off for the long night journey. They had to sleep sitting up, but that was a small matter after the discomforts they had been experiencing. Lanny, the much-traveled, remarked: “If you want to appreciate an airplane, travel across all China before you get on board!”
The journey took the rest of the next day. They had no map, and weren’t even told the names of the places at which they stopped. They were like a consignment of freight, tagged for Kuibyshev, for reasons not known to those who handled the shipment. They were glad to be warm, and to be able to get wholewheat bread and cabbage soup (with small pieces of meat) at the stopping places. They were grateful for the Russian custom of tea-drinking, which provided a huge samovar full of boiling water at all stations.
Their only fears were that they might be put off in favor of more important passengers, or that the Arctic might send a snowstorm and force them down. But the all-powerful Soviet government had weather stations all along their northern coast, and even in the ice-bound islands beyond; and apparently somebody in authority at Kuibyshev wanted to talk to the son of Budd-Erling. The bridal pair stayed on the plane, and the plane stayed on its course, and on the evening of the second day it settled down on a runway well spread with ashes, and they were told o
ne word which they could understand. It was the name of a wheat and cattle town on the middle Volga which had once been Samara, and had been changed in honor of a prominent Soviet commissar named Kuibyshev.
There in the airport was the shrunken and wrinkled old gentleman who had once been an American painter on the French Riviera, and later a député de la république française. He was wrapped in a shaggy bearskin coat and had a hat to match—for you can’t go about with your old bald head entirely bare when the temperature is far below zero. He had just had an attack of influenza, he told them—but he was determined to stick it out and live to attend the funeral of Adolf Hitler. He must have been homesick, for when he set eyes on his nephew he gave him a Russian bear’s hug and kissed him on both whiskery cheeks. Lanny hadn’t had a chance to shave, and looked like a Mongolian herdsman who had been married for several months.
But Laurel was Laurel, and had managed to get her hair in order on board the plane. Uncle Jesse took her two hands in his and looked her over carefully. “My new niece!” he said. “You look all right, but you are undernourished.”
“We have been living on rice,” remarked Lanny. “It will be up to you to feed her.”
“I’ll do my best,” replied the old man. Then, still giving his attention to the lady from Baltimore: “You are a clever little minx, and you have a sharp tongue. I should hate to be your enemy.”
“Quite true,” said the niece, amused. “But how do you know it? Are you psychic?”
“I leave all that rubbish to Lanny. I have read your stories.”
“You found them in Russia?”
“No, hardly. But this government doesn’t make any mistake about the people it lets into the country. The clippings were ordered by cable and came by air in a diplomatic pouch. I was told about them, and asked for the privilege of reading them. You have already made several friends among our literati.”
“Certainly that is a pleasant way to greet an author, Uncle Jesse, and I appreciate it.”
“‘The Herrerwolk’ has already been translated, and will be published on the back page of Pravda if you give your consent.”
Laurel was so pleased she couldn’t keep the tears out of her eyes. “Of course I give it,” she said. “And I give my heart to the Soviet people at war!”
IX
Jesse had got them a room, the most priceless of all possessions in this river town which had once been a wheat-shipping center and now suddenly had become a world capital. “One of your admirers is sleeping on my sofa,” he told the wife, with a chuckle.
They got some food in the airport restaurant, and then somebody’s car took the author of “The Herrenvolk,” together with her duffelbag and husband, through the snow-paved streets of Kuibyshev. Lanny perceived that he was going to be a mere appendage so long as he stayed in the Soviet Union, and perhaps elsewhere; that pleased him, for he was proud of his new treasure, and pleased to have his literary judgment confirmed. Only one thought troubled him, again and again; he couldn’t get over his habit of trying to keep his secret from the Gestapo, and now he would find himself whispering to himself: “Good Lord, what will the Führer and the Reichsmarschall make of this! What will Kurt Meissner make of it!” They had seemed so far away, but now they were near again—and they were sure to have spies in this town.
Everybody wanted to know about Yenan: the number of its caves and their size; the progress of its schools and the number of the pupils; the state of its morale, the size of its armies, and every word they could remember that Mao Tse-tung had spoken: Laurel had notes? Oh, wonderful! Would she produce them and read from them? And would she permit the leading Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg to prepare an interview with her? The story would go to America, and would greatly increase the price which a woman explorer could demand for her work in New York. She couldn’t say No, if only out of gratitude for a warm room to sleep in and nourishing food to eat. More and more clearly her husband saw that a presidential agent’s goose was cooked—and might as well be eaten hot!
With the help of his uncle whom the censors knew, Lanny sent off two cablegrams: one to his father, reading: “Arrived safely from Hongkong via Yenan with wife Laurel Creston Reverdy’s niece stop what news concerning Oriole sailed from Hongkong December eight love to all reply Continental Hotel Kuibyshev Lanny Budd.” The other was to Charles T. Alston at his Washington hotel: “Escaped Hongkong traveled via Yenan wire instructions stop if wanted Washington please facilitate travel self and wife married writer Laurel Creston fellow-passenger yacht Oriole stop yacht left Hongkong December eight kindly mention news if available regards reply Continental Hotel Kuibyshev Lanny Budd.”
After that a distinguished author’s husband had nothing to do but wander about and look at the temporary capital of the Soviet Union at war, and accept the hospitality of all who wanted to invite them. For years Lanny Budd had been known in New York and London as Mister Irma Barnes, and now he was Mister Mary Morrow and didn’t mind it a bit. They went about in their stained and battered sheepskin costumes, and it was perfectly all right, because everybody knew they couldn’t have got new clothes if they had tried. And anyhow, the costumes were like military service stripes. On the streets people would look and then say: “Those must be the Amerikansky who have traveled through China! Wonderful people, the Amerikansky! How soon will they send us help?”
Lanny had read many times that the Russian people were not permitted to talk with foreigners, or that they were afraid to, and seldom invited them to their homes. He and Laurel did not find it so, but they realized that perhaps they were a special case; the fact that they had come from Yenan, and the fact that Lanny was a nephew of Jesse Blackless and Laurel an anti-Nazi writer—these facts put them in a different class from persons in the pay of capitalist newspapers who came and pretended to like the Russians, accepted their hospitality, and then went away and wrote things about them which they considered insulting and often downright inventions.
The American couple walked the wide streets of this river port, which in many ways made Lanny think of the frontier towns of the American West. The snow was piled in ridges, there being neither time nor labor to remove it. The shops had nothing on display, and there were long queues waiting wherever there was a chance of anything inside. The people were poorly clad, and you saw signs of undernourishment, but nothing compared to conditions among the Chinese; what was available was fairly distributed and there was no black market. The people were quiet, sober, and friendly; they seldom smiled, but on the other hand they showed no traces of anxiety. To be sure, the front was some eight hundred miles away, and no bombs had been dropped here, but everybody got the war news, from the papers or from radios in the factories and offices; they knew that their own winter offensive had been stopped by the Germans, and that another great Panzer drive was coming as surely as springtime.
X
Yes, the inhabitants of Kuibyshev, and of Saratov and Stalingrad and the other towns of the Volga, had reasons enough to be afraid, and to worry if they had been so disposed. But they had been born in an age of war and revolution, and excepting the old ones, they had never known a time when their country wasn’t under siege. Sometimes it had been only an ideological, a propaganda siege—but that had been preliminary to political and military attack, and the Soviets had always known it. World capitalism had fought them from the hour of their birth, and with every weapon in its arsenal. Laurel was too young to remember these events, but Lanny had been part of them in his heart and mind, and even to some extent in reality.
He told her how, because of his knowledge of French, he had become secretary-translator to Professor Alston at the Peace Conference; how he had met Lincoln Steffens, who had been sent by President Wilson to Russia and had come home to report: “I have seen the future and it works.” Lanny and Steffens together had taken Colonel House to meet Jesse Blackless in his attic studio in Montmartre, and there they had met three representatives of the new-born revolutionary government. It was there that th
e Prinkipo Conference was planned; and while it never came off, it served the purpose of teaching Lanny Budd how world capitalism worked, and how deadly it was to the cause of the dispossessed all over the earth. So now he was able to understand every pulsebeat of that distrust which filled the souls of Soviet people, and caused them to look upon every stranger as a possible spy and future betrayer.
“The madness of Adolf Hitler has made us allies for the moment,” he told her, “but the Russians find it hard to realize that this is so, and they cannot be persuaded that it will last. When this war is over, America will still be a capitalist nation, the most powerful in the world. Its wealthy class will inevitably be the enemy of every Communist nation—not because it wants to be, but because of the economic forces which drive it.”
“Don’t forget that I have read a volume of Lenin,” remarked Laurel, with a smile. “The theory of economic determinism is not strange to me.”
“You will meet my father, and you will like him, because he is a kind and generous person; but if you talk to him about this situation you will find that he is economically determined, and he will tell you exactly why and how. He has a lot of men on his payroll—maybe ten thousand by now—and when the war is over he will have the devil’s own time trying to meet that payroll. In order to do it he will have to sell goods abroad, and he will come into conflict with states which maintain government monopolies in foreign trade. He will consider that unfair competition and a deadly menace to his ‘free enterprise system.’”