O Shepherd, Speak! Page 11

  Also she did not fail to ask questions about Baby Lanny. Men are so dumb about such matters; they don’t notice details, and if you try to drag things out of them they answer vaguely and absent-mindedly. The little one was two years old and was talking, and a mother would know how he talked and what he said; she would understand that a grandmother who had never seen him couldn’t be content with a photograph but had to know the color of his eyes and his hair, and what he ate, whom he played with, which parent he loved best, and so on.

  The stepfather-in-law also had a claim upon Laurel which was not to be overlooked. He knew that she had discovered in herself the strange gift of mediumship; she went into a trance, and alien voices spoke through her lips. She didn’t know what they were, and neither did Lanny, but Parsifal was firm in the belief that they were the spirits of the dead; he gave to them the same love that he gave to the living, and they responded in kind. It was necessary that Laurel should give him a demonstration of her power, with Lanny and Beauty sitting by, curious to observe what this new environment might bring forth.

  Laurel lay back on her couch and closed her eyes, sighed a few times, and then there was silence. At last Parsifal inquired, in a low persuasive voice, “Is anybody present?” There came a woman’s voice which they expected and recognized, or imagined that they recognized; it was the old Polish medium who had been a member of their household for fifteen years before her recent death. With the aid of Madame Zyszynski’s psychic gift Parsifal had explored the ancient civilizations of India and Ceylon, and she had promised that if she were the first to pass over she would do her best to return. How was she in the spirit world? And Madame said, as all the “spirits” do, that she was well and happy, and had tried to reach him, but the mediums he had found in Marrakech did not have the necessary power.

  “Is there anybody else present?” inquired the man of God. Lanny was expecting to hear the voice of Otto Kahn, the international banker who had been haunting Laurel’s mind, to her own bewilderment and her husband’s. But no, this time it was a newcomer. “There is an old gentleman standing by me,” reported the voice. “He is rather a small man and has a little white mustache. He is very thin and frail and has deep-sunk dark eyes. He wears a black skullcap, and I think he is Jewish.”

  “Tell him that we welcome his presence,” said Parsifal. “Has he something to say to us?”

  “He is speaking French,” said the voice, “but he will speak English if I wish. He says he passed over three years ago. He was a writer, and Lanny was interested in his books.”

  “Will he give us his name?”

  “He says Bergson; Henri Bergson. He says that he despised the Nazis; they offered to make him what they call an honorary Aryan, but he would not accept any favor from them; he wore the Star of David and lived like the other Jews in Paris. He wears the star now; it was supposed to be a badge of shame, but now it is a badge of honor.”

  “Tell him I have studied his ideas,” said Parsifal, a tireless reader of all books that took the idealistic view of philosophy. “I am one of his disciples.”

  “He says that he knows you. He says to tell you that he has been confirmed in his belief that—he is using long words that I do not know, but I try to repeat them as they sound—that mechanistic explanations include only a very small part of the real.”

  “You are doing very well, Madame,” said Parsifal considerately. “M. Bergson is a great philosopher, and I once heard him lecture at the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques. It is an honor that he does in coming to speak to us.”

  “It is too bad that I am a poor ignorant woman,” put in Madame, and went on, pronouncing syllable after syllable. “This polite old gentleman wants you to know that he is still experiencing that continuous creation of unforeseen novelty which goes on in the universe. He says, ‘I feel it more vividly than ever, the action I will and of which I am the sole master. The inert world is solely an abstraction; and concrete reality comprises living conscious beings enframed in inorganic matter.’”

  This went on for several minutes, with both Parsifal and Lanny diligently taking notes, just as if it had been a lecture at the Sorbonne or Oxford University. When it was over, and Laurel had sighed and moaned her way out of the trance, they sat and discussed what had occurred. Laurel assured them that she had never met the author of Creative Evolution; he was a mere name to her, and she couldn’t have named one of his books. Lanny told how, in Paris just before setting out for the Ardennes, he had been strolling on the Quai and had stopped at a bookstall and picked up a paper-bound copy of Bergson’s L’Energie Spirituelle. He had found time to read only a few pages and had left the book with other belongings in a bag at his hotel.

  So you were at liberty to assume that Laurel had just dipped into Lanny’s mind and given a little demonstration of “the continuous creation of unforeseen novelty”—it had surely been that! You didn’t have to believe that the spirit of a departed French metaphysician had had anything to do with this creation—other than by creating a book, which you might properly describe as a bit of consciousness “enframed in inert matter.” You were at liberty to assume that some part of the subconscious mind of Laurel Creston had the power to dip into the subconscious mind of her husband and take out a whole set of ideas and impressions and construct them into a fictional scene. Surely that was a startling enough discovery; Lanny, who had seen it happening with different persons over a period of a decade and a half, was waiting impatiently for some scientist to come along and tell him how these things occurred.

  VI

  The trip from Marrakech was in a luxury liner, with chromium fixtures and snakeskin-covered seats which were unfolded at night to make comfortable beds; excellent meals were served, and the detachable tables enabled a woman writer to revise her manuscripts and a presidential agent to make notes of what he wanted to tell his Boss. The wrinkled sea beneath them crawled, and Lanny recited this line and the rest of Tennyson’s picture of the eagle. “He watches from his mountain walls and like a thunderbolt he falls.” Edward MacDowell had composed a piano sketch on the theme, and Lanny said the fall was impressive, only the eagle hit twice on his way down.

  At Dakar, the “peanut port” of West Africa, they got out and strolled in hot sunshine while men refueled the plane and tested its engines. They had taken this same route, but in reverse, when they had visited Palestine a few months earlier; so there was nothing new about the scene. Dakar had been a great French naval base, and Hitler had tried desperately to build a railroad across the Sahara to it, using slave labor; if he had got there he would have had South America at the mercy of his Luftwaffe. But now all that was over; the Americans had both ends of the dream railroad, and in South America producers and traders were eagerly accumulating North American dollars.

  Another flight, from the bulge of Africa to the bulge of Brazil. Lanny’s friend Professor Alston, once a geographer, had pointed put to him how these coast lines corresponded, and said they had been parts of one continent which had split apart in a gigantic convulsion. Many such events had occurred in the preparation of this earth for human habitation; had it all been accident, or had it been planned? Would the future be planned, or would that too be accident?—thus a student of Bergson, trying to understand his world, and not at all satisfied with the progress he was making. If only men would stop killing one another all over the earth, they might really pay heed to the claims of idealistic philosophy.

  From there northward, across the equator and to the large island of Puerto Rico, which had been taken over by the United States half a century ago. Order had been maintained and democratic institutions were being taught, but poverty continued unabated. The population had grown beyond the ability of the island’s agriculture to support it. A century and a half ago an English clergyman named Malthus had pointed out this unfortunate tendency; since his time the population of the earth had more than doubled, and there was still poverty and misery in all the backward lands, and insecurity and fear ever
ywhere. The two amateur philosophers discussed the problem of birth control, or planned parenthood, as it was now being called. Puerto Rico is a Catholic land; its Church forbids the use and even the spreading of this priceless knowledge, and so these unhappy people are condemned to misery and degradation for generation after generation.

  VII

  From Bolling Field Laurel took a plane to New York, and Lanny telephoned to Baker, to put himself at the President’s disposal. He rode into Washington and put up at the Mayflower, where Baker had made arrangements for him. The place swarmed with busy bureaucrats, carrying leather briefcases, and portly executives come to negotiate contracts for tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. Lanny had a bath and a shave, and then he called the President’s man again, and was told that his appointment was for the evening of the next day. Baker added, “Professor Alston is at your hotel.” Lanny said, “Oh, good!”

  He would have company, and give a lot of information, and get a few items in return. This college professor, Lanny’s first and only employer just a quarter of a century ago, was responsible for his having taken on the volunteer job of P.A., and the two were like father and son in their trust of each other. Alston was one of the New Dealers from the old days back in Albany who still addressed F.D.R. as “Governor.” For twelve years now he had had a job in the Department of Commerce at which he did not work; it was an excuse for him to have a salary and an expense account. What he did was to flit here and there over the United States and sometimes abroad in the role of “fixer,” otherwise known as “trouble shooter.” He arbitrated disputes among bureaucrats and brass, he scolded executives who were falling behind schedules and patted them on the back when they promised to do better. He was one of those wiry little men who do not appear to age; his hair was white but he was still sprightly and could get along with very little sleep. Many people were in awe of him because he stood near to the throne, and he told Lanny that his morning and evening prayers consisted of repeating to himself Lord Acton’s formula that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  The meetings of this pair depended upon chance, and they made the most of each one. They had dinner together and spent the evening. Lanny told what he had seen of the Battle of the Bulge; it was over now, having lasted just a month, and Alston knew the results. “We were taken badly by surprise,” he said, “but in the long run I don’t think it matters. We have taken fifty thousand German prisoners and inflicted twice as many casualties as we suffered. We had to fight all those Germans somewhere, and they won’t be on hand when we start our advance to the Rhine.”

  Lanny couldn’t keep from smiling. “It seemed so different when I was in it,” he remarked. “It was such a mean place to fight.”

  “Of course; but it was just as mean for the Germans. I was talking yesterday with an American officer who was captured at Celles, a place at the tip of the salient only four miles from the Meuse. A Panzer battalion made the rush, and then they waited three days for their army to bring them more gasoline and it didn’t. They realized that they would be cut off, and there was nothing for them to do but to burn all their tanks and other vehicles and walk back. They were lost and had to fight all the way, hiding from Americans as you hid from Germans—and they didn’t find it a bit more comfortable. They shot anyone who tried to lag behind.”

  “What happened to your officer?” asked Lanny, to whom it was a human-interest story.

  “He had nothing to eat and was very tired. He waited until the Germans were busy in a fight and then just walked off to one side. Presently he came to an American outpost and made himself known.”

  VIII

  Lanny told about the pozit ammunition and the tremendous effect it had had. Alston knew about it and said that it had knocked sixteen hundred Luftwaffe planes out of the sky during the Ardennes fighting. “I don’t think they have many more planes,” he said. “When fair weather comes we’ll have their armies on the run.” When Lanny remarked that the new shells had been scarce at Bastogne his friend replied, “That won’t be true much longer, for we have sent three-quarters of a million of them over there. We haven’t forgotten the Pacific either. The Jap air forces probably haven’t the least idea what is happening to them; they just know that our gunners have improved miraculously.”

  Lanny told about his visit to Strasbourg University. Alston didn’t know who had sent in the report, but he had got the substance of it—that the Germans were making no progress toward atomic fission. “That is the greatest load that was ever lifted off our minds,” he said, and added, “You understand, Lanny, this is the tightest secret in the world. We are going to have the bomb. I don’t know when—I don’t think anybody knows—but it’s coming, and when it comes it will end the war.”

  “In time for the Germans?” inquired the P.A.

  “We expect to finish the Germans this summer. If the bomb is ready before then, it will save a lot of American lives. That’s all I can tell you, because it’s all I know. I was sent to a place out West where one of the atomic piles is in operation, and I’m sure they would have told me the probable time if they had known. What they say is that everything is new and unprecedented, and nobody can guess what new bugs they may encounter.”

  They talked about the subject which was nearest to the hearts of both of them, the great man whom they served. “How is he?” Lanny asked, and the answer was, “The doctors can’t find anything organically wrong with him; but he’s overworking, and no one can get him to stop.”

  “He tries to keep too much in his own hands,” Lanny ventured. “As a planner and inspirer he is the greatest man we have ever had in the White House; but a good administrator has to know how to delegate power.”

  “I said almost those words to him,” replied the fixer. “He turned his shrewd eyes upon me and asked, ‘To whom?’ Then, of course, I was stumped. I didn’t know who could carry the load. When he said, ‘To you, Charlie?’ I had to admit that I had all I could do. And poor Harry Hopkins is staggering along from one job to the next, slowly dying.” Alston went on to name one man after another who had been tried and found wanting. “Everything that comes up appears to be vital, everything depends on everything else, and the war is all one.”

  “And the peace,” added Lanny. “I am guessing that history will say that F.D.R. is doing better in the war than he did before it.”

  “That’s because he has built a huge machine which is ready to hand—the Army, the Navy, the Air Force. Those men have learned their jobs, and know how to delegate authority; they give obedience and loyalty as a matter of course. But in peace you are scouting around, picking new men for new jobs—and the first thing they all do is to start fighting one another instead of the enemy, which is poverty and confusion and greed. Every day I give to politics I’m more sorry I ever left the field of geography, where things are fixed and you can count on them!”

  IX

  Lanny was taken into the White House by the customary “social door,” which was really the front door but served the purposes of a back door. The orders were that persons brought in by Baker were not stopped or questioned; they went past the naval guards with no more than an informal sort of salute, made with one finger, and up a red-carpeted side stairway to the second floor. At the door of the President’s bedroom sat Prettyman, his negro valet, ready and vigorous—he had to be, for he lifted a heavy load from wheel chair to bed or vice versa. “Evenin’, gentlemen,” he said, for he knew them both, and stood up respectfully as they approached and tapped on the door.

  The P.A. knew that room and everything in it as well as he knew his own. It had been in the summer of 1937 that he had first been brought here, so this was the eighth year. A generously proportioned room, with old-fashioned mahogany furniture, and pictures of ships, for ship lore was one of F.D.R.’s hobbies. There was a reading table by the bed with a lamp, and on the bed a stack of documents and letters which the harassed man was supposed to read and perhaps sign before he went t
o sleep. There was a blue and white coverlet and the occupant wore a knitted blue crew-neck sweater over his pajama coat—he was subject to what he called “the sniffles.”

  What concerned Lanny was the face that he saw. He had been told that the President’s health was failing, but even so he was shocked. It was the face of an invalid, drawn and haggard; where for years had been the glow of health and energy there was now plain exhaustion. It would, of course, have been the worst of taste for a visitor to reveal this reaction; he must wear a quick smile and be ready to respond to the playful greeting which would never fail while the spirit of F.D.R. remained in his body. “Hello, how’s the old Bulge-battler?”—thus showing that he had received and read his agent’s report.

  “I’ve been a beachcomber on the Cap d’Antibes for two weeks,” said Lanny, grinning. “I wish you could have been there.”

  “Never mind,” said the Boss. “Someday I’m going to dump this load and go back to Hyde Park and write history. You shall come and visit me and tell me about all the great people you have known. Tell me about the Bulge.”

  In Franklin Roosevelt there was a boy who had never grown up. He really loved a story and wanted to hear all the details of this one. His heart sorrowed because he couldn’t have been there himself—his old sturdy self that would have tramped through snowbound forests and carried any soldier’s load. They were the dear dead days beyond recall but they lived in his memory; he was enraptured by the adventure of three Monuments men hiding in the hay and roared with delight when Lanny imitated the German exhortations with which he had marched a column of prisoners out of a farmyard. “That’s where we beat the enemy,” he exclaimed. “Our wits are quicker; our people are accustomed to thinking for themselves, and wherever there is an emergency there is always an idea to meet it.”