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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!"

V

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!

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.

VI

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;

VII

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