Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

Among Irma’s acquaintances on Long Island was the heiress of a food-packing industry; and since people will eat, even when they do nothing else, Brenda Spratt’s dividends were still coming in. She had appeared fascinated by Lanny’s accounts of old masters in Europe and his dealings in them; so now he sent her a cablegram informing her that she could obtain a unique art treasure in exchange for four hundred and eighty thousand cans of spaghetti with tomato sauce at the wholesale price of three dollars per case of forty-eight cans. Lanny didn’t cable all that, of course—it was merely his way of teasing Irma about the Long Island plutocracy. Next day he had a reply informing him at what bank he could call for the money. A genuine triumph of the soul of man over the body, of the immortal part over the mortal; and incidentally it would provide Lanny Budd with pocket-money for the winter. He invited his wife to state whether her father had ever done a better day’s business at the age of thirty-one.

The over-taxed swells of Vienna came running to meet the American heiress and to tell her brilliant young husband what old masters they had available. Irma might have danced till dawn every night, and Lanny might have made a respectable fortune, transferring culture to the land of his fathers. But what he preferred was meeting Socialist writers and party leaders and hearing their stories of suffering and struggle in this city which was like a head without a body. The workers were overwhelmingly Socialist, while the peasants of the country districts were Catholic and reactionary. To add to the confusion, the Hitlerites were carrying on a tremendous drive, telling the country yokels and the city hooligans that all their troubles were due to Jewish profiteers.

The municipal government, in spite of near-bankruptcy, was going bravely ahead with a program of rehousing and other public services. This was the thing of which Lanny had been dreaming, the socialization of industry by peaceful and orderly methods, and he became excited about it and wished to spend his time traveling about looking at blocks of workers' homes and talking to the people who lived in them. Amiable and well-bred people, going to bed early to save light and fuel, and working hard at the task of making democracy a success. Their earnings were pitifully small, and when Lanny heard stories of infant mortality and child malnutrition and milk prices held up by profiteers, it rather spoiled his enjoyment of stately banquets in mansions with historic names. Irma said: "You won’t let yourself have any fun, so we might as well go on home."

It wasn’t much better at Bienvenu, as the young wife was soon to learn. The world had become bound together with ties invisible but none the less powerful, so that when the price of corn and hogs dropped in Nebraska the price of flowers dropped on the Cap d’Antibes. Lanny explained the phenomenon: the men who speculated in corn and hogs in Chicago no longer gave their wives the money to buy imported perfumes, so the leading industry of the Cap went broke. Leese, who ran Bienvenu, was besieged by nieces and nephews and cousins begging to be taken onto the Budd staff. There was a swarm of them already, twice as many as would have been employed for the same tasks on Long Island; but in the Midi they had learned how to divide the work, and nobody ever died from overexertion. Now there were new ones added, and it was a delicate problem, because it was Irma’s money and she was entitled to have a say. What she said was that servants oughtn’t to be permitted to bother their employers with the hard-luck stories of their relatives. Which meant that Irma still had a lot to learn about life in France!

The tourists didn’t come, and the "season" was slow—so slow that it began to stop before it got started. The hotelkeepers were frightened, the merchants of luxury goods were threatened with ruin, and of course the poor paid for it. Lanny knew, because he went on helping with that Socialist Sunday school, where he heard stories which spoiled his appetite and his enjoyment of music, and troubled his wife because she knew what was in his thoughts—that she oughtn’t to spend money on clothes and parties while so many children weren’t getting enough to eat.

But what could you do about it? You had to pay your servants, or at any rate feed them, and it was demoralizing if you didn’t give them work to do. Moreover, how could you keep up the prices of foods except by buying some? Irma’s father and uncles had fixed it firmly in her mind that the way to make prosperity was to spend; but Lanny seemed to have the idea that you ought to buy cheap foods and give them to the poor. Wouldn’t that demoralize the poor and make parasites of them? Irma thought she saw it happening to a bunch of "comrades" on the Riviera who practically lived on the Budd bounty, and rarely said "Thank you." And besides, what was to become of the people who raised the more expensive foods? Were they going to have to eat them?

Life is a compromise. On Sunday evening Lanny would go down into the Old Town of Cannes and explain the wastes of the competitive system to a group of thirty or forty proletarians: French and Provencal, Ligurian and Corsican, Catalan and even one Algerian. On Monday evening he would take his wife and mother to Sept Chenes and play accompaniments for a singer from the Paris opera at one of Emily’s soirees. On Tuesday he would spend the day helping to get ready for a dinner-dance at Bienvenu, with a colored jazz band, Venetian lanterns with electric lights all over the lawns, and the most fashionable and titled people coming to do honor to the daughter of J. Paramount Barnes. Yes, there were still some who had money and would not fail in their economic duty! People who had seen the storm coming and put their fortune into bonds; people who owned strategic industries, such as the putting up of canned spaghetti for the use of millions who lived in tiny apartments in cities and had never learned how to make tomato sauce!

Robbie Budd came visiting that winter. He had some kind of queer deal on; he was meeting with a former German U-boat commander who had entered the service of a Chinese mandarin, and this latter had been ousted and now wanted Budd machine guns so as to get back. He had got the support of some bankers in French IndoChina, but they didn’t want to buy French munitions, for fear of publicity—a shady affair all round, but Robbie explained with a grin that one had to pick up money where one could these days. No chance to sell any of the products of peace in Europe now!

He told the same stories of hard times which his son had heard in Berlin and Vienna. There were breadlines in all the American cities, and on street corners one saw men, and some women, stamping their feet and holding out apples in their half-frozen hands. The price of apples having slumped, this was a way to get rid of them; a nickel apiece, Mister, and won’t you help a poor guy get a cup of coffee? There was no way to count the unemployed, but everybody agreed that the number was increasing and the situation was terrible. Robbie thanked God for the Great Engineer whom he had helped to elect President; that harassed man was standing firm as a rock, insisting that Congress should balance the budget. If it was done, business would pick up in the end. It always had and always must.

Robbie had paid off one-half of the notes which he had given to Lanny, Beauty, and Marceline as security for the money turned over to him during the Wall Street panic. He had invested a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the three of them in United States government bonds, and now tried to persuade them to shift it to stocks. They discussed the matter for an hour or so, sitting in front of a blazing fire of cypress wood in the drawing-room of the home. Beauty wavered, but Lanny said "No," and said it again and again.