Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

Lanny admitted that he understood it, and his host continued:

"My ancestors were master-traders all the way from Smyrna to Gibraltar while yours were barbarians in the dark northern forests, killing the aurochs with clubs and spears. Naturally our view of life was different from yours. But when you take to commerce, the differences disappear quickly. I have heard that in your ancestral state of Connecticut the Yankee does not have his feelings hurt when you call him slick. You have heard, perhaps, of David Harum, who traded horses."

"I have heard also of Potash and Perlmutter," said Lanny, with a smile.

"It is the same here, all around the shores of this ancient sea which once was the civilized world. The Greeks are considered skillful traders; take Zaharoff, for example. The Turks are not easy to deceive, and I am told that the Armenians can get the better of any race in the world. Always, of course, I am referring to the professional traders, those who live or die by it. The peasant is a different proposition; the primary producer is the predestined victim, whether he is in Connecticut buying wooden nutmegs or in Anatolia receiving coins made of base metal which he will not be clever enough to pass on."

Lanny sat with Madame Zyszynski, but the results he obtained were not of the best. Tecumseh, the noble redskin, was suspicious and inclined to be crotchety; he took offense when one did not accept his word, and Lanny had made the mistake of being too honest. The way to get results was to be like Parsifal Dingle, who welcomed the spirits quite simply as his friends, chatting with them and the "control" in an amiable matter-of-fact way. Apparently it was with the spirits as with healing: except ye be converted, and become as little children! . . .

What Tecumseh would do was to send messages to Lanny through Parsifal. He would say: "Tell that smart young man that Marcel was here, and that he is painting spirit pictures, much more wonderful than anything he ever did on earth—but they will never be sold at auctions." Lanny wanted to know if Marcel objected to having his works sold; but for a long time the painter ignored his question. Then one day Tecumseh said, rather grudgingly, that it didn’t really matter to Marcel; everything was sold in Lanny’s world, and it was no use keeping beautiful things in a storeroom. This sounded as if the spirit world was acquiring a "pinkish" tinge.

Madame gave several seances every day. She had done it while she was earning her living on Sixth Avenue, and insisted that it didn’t hurt her. She would accommodate anyone who was interested, and presently she was delving into the past of the Rabinowich family, telling about those members who had "passed over." It was a bit unsatisfactory, for there were many members of that family, and Jascha had lost track of them; he said that he never heard from them except when someone needed money for some worthy purpose, and all purposes were worthy. He said that the way to check on the identity of any member of his family in the spirit world would be that he was asking for money to be given to a son or daughter, a nephew or niece still on earth!

But there had been indeed an Uncle Nahum, who had peddled goods in Russian-Polish villages, and had been clubbed to death by the Black Hundreds. The realistic details of this event sounded convincing to Mama Robin, who had witnessed such an incident as a child and still had nightmares now and then as a result. Then it was Jascha’s own father talking to him; when he mentioned that his beard had turned white faster on one side than on the other, and how he had kept his money hidden under a loose brick in the hearth, Lanny saw his urbane host look startled. Johannes said afterward that he had thought all this must be a fraud of some sort, but now he didn’t know what to think. It was really unthinkable.

So it went on, all over the pleasure vessel. The gray-bearded and heavy-minded Captain Moeller condescended to try the experiment, and found himself in conversation with his eldest son, who had been a junior officer on a U-boat, and told how it felt to be suffocated at the bottom of the sea. Baby Frances’s nursemaid, a girl with a Cockney accent who had got a few scraps of education at a "council school," learned to sit for long periods talking with her father, a Tommy who had been killed on the Somme, and who told her all about his early life, the name of the pub where he had made bets on horse races, and where his name was still chalked up on a board, along with that of other dead soldiers of the neighborhood.

How did Madame Zyszynski get such things? You could say that she sneaked about in the yacht and caught scraps of conversation, and perhaps rummaged about in people’s cabins. But it just happened that she didn’t. She was a rather dull old woman who had been first a servant and then the wife of the butler to a Warsaw merchant. She suffered from varicose veins and dropsy in its early stages. She understood foreign languages with difficulty and didn’t bother to listen most of the time, but preferred to sit in her own cabin playing endless games of solitaire. When she read, it was the pictures in some cheap magazine, and the strange things she did in her trances really didn’t interest her overmuch; she would answer your questions as best she could, but hardly ever asked any of you. She declared again and again that she did these things because she was poor and had to earn her living. She insisted, furthermore, that she had never heard the voice of Tecumseh, and knew about him only what her many clients had told her.

But what a different creature was this Indian chieftain! He was not the Tecumseh of history, he said, but an Iroquois of the same name. His tribe had been all but wiped out by smallpox. Now he ruled a tribe of spirits, and amused himself at the expense of his former enemies, the whites. He was alert, masterful, witty, shrewd— and if there was anything he didn’t know, he would tell you to come back tomorrow and perhaps he would have it for you. But you had to be polite. You had to treat him as a social equal, and the best way to get along was to be a humble petitioner. "Please, Tecumseh, see if you can do me this great favor!"

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!