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army. He had sold marks and bought shares in German industry, and now he was sometimes

referred to as a "king" of this and that. Doubtless all kings, underneath their crowns and inside

their royal robes, were hesitant and worried mortals, craving affection and tormented by fears of

poison and daggers, of demons and gods, or, in these modem times, of financial collapses and

revolutions.

Jascha Rabinowich had changed his name but had remained a Jew, which meant that he was

race-conscious; he was kept that way by contempt and persecution. Part of the time he

blustered and part of the time he cringed, but he tried to hide both moods. What he wanted

was to be a man like other men, and to be judged according to his merits. But he had had to flee

from a pogrom in Russia, and he lived in Germany knowing that great numbers of people

despised and hated him; he knew that even in America, which he considered the most

enlightened of countries, the people in the slums would call him a "sheeny" and a Christ-killer,

while the "best" people would exclude him from their country clubs.

He talked about all this with Lanny, who had fought hard for his sister's right to marry

Hansi. People accused the Jews of loving money abnormally. "We are traders," said

Johannes. "We have been traders for a couple of thousand years, because we have been driven

from our land. We have had to hide in whatever holes we could find in one of these

Mediterranean ports, and subsist by buying something at a low price and selling it at a higher

price. The penalty of failure being death has sharpened our wits. In a port it often happens that

we buy from a person we shall never see again, and sell to some other person under the same

conditions; they do not worry much about our welfare, nor we about theirs. That may be a

limitation in our morality, but it is easy to understand."

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."

IV

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!"

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