Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

Odessa had changed hands several times during the revolution and civil war. It had been bombarded by the French fleet, and many of its houses destroyed. One of the sights of the city was the Square of the Victims, where thousands of slain revolutionists had been buried in a common grave, under a great pyramid of stones. The young people went to it as to a shrine, while their elders sought entertainment without success. The young ones insisted upon visiting some of the many sanatoriums, which are built near bodies of water formed by silted-up river mouths. These too were shrines, because they were occupied by invalided workers. That was the way it was going to be in the future; those who produced the wealth would enjoy it! "They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat." Thus the ancient Hebrew prophet, and it sounded so Red that in Canada a clergyman had been indicted by the grand jury for quoting it. Hansi and Rahel had the blood of these ancient prophets in their veins, and Bess had been taught that their utterances were the word of God, so this new religion came easily to them. It promised to save the workers, and Lanny hoped it would have better success than Mohammed had had in his efforts to help the watch-dogs of the tents.

Lanny was in his usual position, between the two sets of extremists. During this Russian visit he served as a sort of liaison officer to the Robin family. Johannes didn’t dare to discuss Communism with any of his young people, for he had found that by doing so he injured his standing; he talked with Lanny, hoping that something could be done to tone them down. In the opinion of the man of money, this Bolshevik experiment was surviving on what little fat it had accumulated during the old regime. People could go on living in houses so long as they stood up, and they could wear old clothes for decades if they had no sense of shame—look about you! But the making of new things was something else again. Of course, they could hire foreign experts and have factories built, and call it a Five-Year Plan—but who was going to do any real work if he could put it off on somebody else? And how could any business enterprise be run by politicians? "You don’t know them," said Johannes, grimly. "In Germany I have had to."

"It’s an experiment," Lanny admitted. "Too bad it had to be tried in such a backward country."

"All I can say," replied the man of affairs, "is I’m hoping it doesn’t have to be tried in any country where I live!"

This was a situation which had been developing in the Robin family for many years, ever since Barbara Pugliese and Jesse Black-less had explained the ideals of proletarian revolution to the young Robins in Lanny’s home: an intellectual vaccination which had taken with unexpected virulence. Lanny had watched with both curiosity and concern the later unfoldment of events. He knew how Papa and Mama Robin adored their two boys, centering all their hopes upon them. Papa made money in order that Hansi and Freddi might be free from the humiliations and cares of poverty. Papa and Mama watched their darlings with solicitude, consulting each other as to their every mood and wish. Hansi wanted to play the fiddle; very well, he should be a great musician, with the best teachers, everything to make smooth his path. Freddi wished to be a scholar, a learned person; very well, Papa would pay for everything, and give up his natural desire to have the help of one of his sons in his own business.

It had seemed not surprising that young people should be set afire with hopes of justice for the poor, and the ending of oppression and war. Every Jew in the world knows that his ancient proph­ets proclaimed such a millennium, the coming of such a Messiah. If Hansi and Freddi were excessive in their fervor, well, that was to be expected at their age. As they grew older, they would acquire discretion and learn what was possible in these days. The good mother and the hard-driving father waited for this, but waited in vain. Here was Hansi twenty-five, and his brother only two years younger, and instead of calming down they appeared to be acquiring a mature determination, with a set of theories or dogmas or whatever you chose to call them, serving as a sort of backbone for their dreams.

To the Jewish couple out of the ghetto the marriage of Hansi to Robbie Budd’s daughter had appeared a great triumph, but in the course of time they had discovered there was a cloud to this silver lining. Bess had caught the Red contagion from Hansi, and brought to the ancient Jewish idealism a practicality which Johannes recognized as Yankee, a sternness derived from her ancestral Puritanism. Bess was the reddest of them all, and the most uncompromising. Her expression would be full of pity and tenderness, but it was all for those whom she chose to regard as the victims of social injus­tice. For those others who held them down and garnered the fruits of their toil she had a dedicated antagonism; when she talked about capitalism and its crimes her face became set, and you knew her for the daughter of one of Cromwell’s Ironsides.

Lanny understood that in the depths of his soul Johannes quailed before this daughter-in-law. He tried to placate her with soft words, he tried to bribe her with exactly the right motor-car, a piano of the most exquisite tone, yachting-trips to the most romantic places of the seven seas, and not a single person on board who would oppose her ideas; only the members of her own two families and their attendants. "Look!" the poor man of nullions seemed to be saying. "Here is Rahel with a baby who has to be nursed, and here is the lovely baby of your adored brother; here is this ship of dreams which exists for the happiness of all of you. It will go wherever you wish, and the service will be perfect; you can even break the rules of discipline at sea, you and Hansi can go into the forecastle and play music for the crew, or invite them up into the saloon once a week and play for them—in spite of the horror of an old martinet trained in the merchant marine of Germany. Anything, anything on earth, provided you will be gracious, and forgive me for being a millionaire, and not despise me because I have wrung my fortune out of the toil and sweat of the wage-slaves!"

This program of appeasement had worked for four years, for the reason that Bess had laid hold of the job of becoming a pianist. She had concentrated her Puritan fanaticism upon acquiring muscular power and co-ordination, in combining force with delicacy, so that the sounds she produced would not ruin the fine nuances, the exquisite variations of tone, which her more highly trained husband was achieving. But Johannes knew in his soul that this task wasn’t going to hold her forever; some day she and Hansi both would consider themselves musicians—and they meant to be Red musicians, to play for Red audiences and earn money for the Red cause. They would make for themselves the same sort of reputation that Isadora Duncan had made by waving red scarves at her audiences and dancing the Marseillaise. They would plunge into the hell of the class struggle, which everyone could see growing hotter day by day all over Europe.

Besides Mama, the only person to whom Johannes Robin unbos­omed himself of these anxieties was Lanny Budd, who had always been so wise beyond his years, a confidant at the age of fourteen, a counselor and guide at the age of nineteen. Lanny had brought Johannes together with his father, and listened to their schemes, and knew many of the ins and outs of their tradings. He knew that Johannes had been selling Budd machine guns to Nazi agents, to be used in the open warfare these people carried on with the Communists in the streets of Berlin. Johannes had asked Lanny never to mention this to the boys, and Lanny had obliged him. What would they do if they found it out? They might refuse to live any longer in the Berlin palace, or to travel in the hundred-dollar-an-hour yacht. Bess might even refuse to let it carry her name. Thus Jascha Rabinowich, standing in front of his private wailing wall. Oi, oi!