Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

All this seemed to indicate that there was some sort of universal pool of mindstuff, an ocean in which Lanny’s thoughts and Madame Zyszynski’s and other people’s merged and flowed together. Figure yourself as a bubble floating on the surface of an ocean; the sun shines on you and you have very lovely colors; other bubbles float near, and you come together and form a cluster of bubbles—the guests of the yacht Bessie Budd, for example. One by one the bub bles break, and their substance returns to the ocean, and in due course becomes the substance of new bubbles.

This theory obliged you to believe that a medium had the power to dip into this mind substance and get facts to which the medium did not have access in any normal way. Was it easier to believe that than to believe that the spirits of dead persons were sending communications to the living? Lanny found it so; for he had lived long enough to watch the human mind develop along with the body and to decay along with it. In some strange way the two seemed to be bound together and to share the same fate. But don’t fool yourself into thinking that you knew what the nature of that union was; how a thought could make a muscle move, or how a chemical change in the body could produce cheerful or depressed thoughts. Those questions were going to take wiser men than Lanny Budd to answer them; he kept wishing that people would stop robbing and killing one another and settle down to this task of finding out what they really were.

The hundred-dollar-an-hour cruise was continued eastward, and presently they were approaching the Peninsula of Gallipoli, where so many Englishmen had paid with their lives for the blundering of their superiors. Great ships had gone down, and the beaches had been piled with mangled bodies. Among the many wounded had been the father of Lanny’s amie, Rosemary Codwilliger, Countess of Sandhaven. He had "passed over" not long ago, and Lanny wondered, did his spirit haunt this place? He asked Tecumseh about it, and it wasn’t long before Colonel Codwilliger was "manifesting"; but unfortunately Lanny hadn’t known him very well, and must write to Rosemary in the Argentine to find out if the statements were correct.

They passed through the Dardanelles on a gusty, rainy afternoon, and the shores looked much like any other shores veiled in mist. Lanny and Bess walked for a while on deck, and then went into the saloon and played the Schubert four-hand piano sonata. Then Lanny came out again, for somewhere ahead was the Island of Prinkipo which had been so much in his thoughts at the Peace Conference eleven years before. It had been chosen as the place for a meeting with the Bolsheviks, in President Wilson’s effort to patch up a truce with them. The elder statesmen had found it difficult to believe there existed a place with such a musical-comedy name.

It might as well have been a musical-comedy performance—such was Lanny’s bitter reflection. The statesmen didn’t go to Prinkipo, and when later they met the Russians at Genoa they didn’t settle anything. They went home to get ready for another war—Lanny was one of those pessimistic persons who were sure it was on the way. He told people so, and they would shrug their shoulders. What could they do about it? What could anybody do? C’est la nature!

Perhaps it was the rain which caused these melancholy thoughts; perhaps the spirits of those tens of thousands of dead Englishmen and Turks; or perhaps of the dogs of Constantinople, which during the war had been gathered up and turned loose on this musical-comedy island to starve and devour one another. Under the religion of the country it was not permitted to kill them, so let them eat one another! The Prophet, born among a nomadic people, had loved the dog and praised it as the guardian of the tent; he had endeavored to protect it, but had not been able to foresee great cities with swarms of starveling curs and a denouement of cannibalism.

The southern hills of this Sea of Marmora had been the scene of events about which Lanny had heard his father talking with Zaharoff. The munitions king had financed the invasion of Turkey by his fellow-Greeks, spending half his fortune on it, so he had said— though of course you didn’t have to assume that everything he said was true. Anyhow, the Greeks had been routed and hosts of them driven into the sea, after which the victorious Turkish army had appeared before the British fortifications and the guns of the fleet. This critical situation had brought about the fall of the Lloyd George government and thus played hob with the plans of Robbie Budd for getting oil concessions. Robbie was one of those men who use governments, his own and others', threatening wars and sometimes waging them; while Lanny was an amiable playboy who traveled about on a hundred-dollar-an-hour yacht, making beautiful music, reading books of history and psychic research, and being troubled in his conscience about the way the world was going. He asked his friends very earnestly what ought to be done. Some thought they knew; but the trouble was, their opinions differed so greatly;

The company went ashore in the crowded city, which had once been the capital of the Moslem world, and now was known as Istanbul. They got cars, as usual, and were driven about to see the sights. They visited the great cathedral of St. Sophia, and in the seraglio of the late sultan they inspected the harem, in which now and then a faithless wife had been strangled with a cord, tied in a sack, and set afloat in the Bosporus. They strolled through the bazaars, where traders of various races labored diligently to sell them souvenirs, from Bergama rugs to "feelthy postcards." Through the crowded street came a fire-engine with a great clangor; a modern one, painted a brilliant red—but Lanny saw in imagination the young Zaharoff riding the machine, busy with schemes to collect for his services. Were they still called tulumbadschi? And did they still charge to put out your fire—or to let it burn, as you preferred?

The unresting Bessie Budd stole northward along the coast of the immensely deep Black Sea, called by the ancient Greeks "friendly to strangers." The Soviet Union was in the middle of the Five-Year Plan, and miracles were confidently expected. The travelers' goal was Odessa, a city with a great outdoor stairway which they had seen in a motion picture. Their passports had been visaed and everything arranged in advance; they had only to make themselves known to Intourist, and they would have automobiles and guides and hotels to the limit of their supply of valuta.

"I have seen the future and it works." So Lincoln Steffens had said to Lanny Budd. Stef had had the eyes of faith, and so had Hansi and Bess and Rahel. When they looked at buildings much in need of repair and people wearing sneakers and patched sweaters, they said: "Wait till the new factories get going." They told the girl guides that they were "comrades," and they were taken off to in spect the latest styles in day nurseries and communal kitchens. They were motored into the country to visit a co-operative farm; when Hansi was asked about his occupation at home, he admitted that he was a violinist, and the people rushed to provide an instrument. All work on the place stopped while he stood on the front porch and played Old Folks at Home and Kathleen Mavourneen and Achron’s Hebrew Melody. It was heart-warming; but would it help get tractors and reapers into condition for the harvest soon to be due?

Irma went on some of these expeditions, and listened politely to the enthusiasms of her friends; but to Mama Robin she confessed that she found "the future" most depressing. Mama shrugged her shoulders and said: "What would you expect? It’s Russia." She had learned about it as a child, and didn’t believe it could ever be changed. In the days of the Tsar people had been so unhappy they had got drunk and crawled away into some hole to sleep. The Bolsheviks had tried to stop the making of liquor, but the peasants had made it and smuggled it into the towns—"just like in America," said Mama. She would have preferred not to have these painful old memories revived.