but their shares of stock; also to workingmen whose families starved unless the weekly pay
envelopes were filled. It was a libel upon business administrators to suppose that they had no
sense of duties owed to other people, even though most of these people were strangers.
"Moreover," said Johannes, "when a man has spent his life learning to pursue a certain kind
of activity, it is no easy matter to persuade him to drop it at the height of his powers.
Difficulties, yes; but he has expected them, and takes them as a challenge, he enjoys coping
with them and showing that he can master them. To give up and run away from them is an
act of cowardice which would undermine his moral foundations; he would have no use for
himself thereafter, but would spend his time brooding, like an admiral who veered about and
deserted his fleet.
"My children have their own moral code," continued the money master, "and they have the
task of convincing me that it applies to my case. They wish to build a new and better world,
and I would be glad if they could succeed, and if I saw any hope of success I would join
them. I ask for their plans, and they offer me vague dreams, in which as a man of affairs I see
no practicality. It is like the end of
rainbow bridge on which to get to it, and while the gods may be able to walk on a rainbow,
my investors and working people cannot. My children assure me that a firmer bridge will be
constructed, and when I ask for the names of the engineers, they offer me party leaders and
propagandists, speechmakers who cannot even agree among themselves; if it were not for
what they call the capitalist police they would fall to fighting among themselves and we
should have civil war instead of Utopia. How can my two boys expect me to agree with them
until they have at least managed to agree between themselves?"
Lanny was sad to have no answer to this question. He had already put it to his sister, and she
could say only that she and her husband were right, while Freddi and Rahel were wrong. No
use putting the question to the other pair, for their answer would be the same. Neither couple
was going to give way—any more than Lanny himself was going to give up his conviction that
it was the program of the Communists which had caused the development of Fascism and
Nazism—or at any rate had made possible its spread in Italy and Germany. Only in the
Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon lands, where democratic institutions were firmly rooted, had
neither Reds nor anti-Reds been able to make headway.
II
So there wasn't any chance of persuading Johannes Robin to retire to a monastery or even to
a private yacht right now. He didn't pretend to know what was going to happen in Germany,
but he knew that these were stormy times and that he, the admiral, would stand by his
righting fleet. He would protect his properties and keep his factories running; and if, in order
to get contracts and concessions it was necessary to make a present to some powerful politician,
Johannes would bargain shrewdly and pay no more than he had to. That had been the way of
the world since governments had first been invented, and a Jewish trader, an exile barely
tolerated in a strange land, had to be satisfied with looking out for his own. His sons felt more
at home in Germany and dreamed of trying to change it; but for the child of the ghetto it was
enough that he obeyed the law. "Not very noble," he admitted, sadly; "but when the nobler
ones come to me for help, they get it."
The world was in a bad way and getting worse. Banks were failing all over the United
States, and unemployment increasing steadily. A presidential election was due in November,
and the political parties had held their conventions and made their nomina tions; the
Republicans had endorsed the Great Engineer and all that he had done, while the Democrats
nominated the Governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt by name. Johannes asked if
Lanny knew anything about this man, and Lanny said no; but when the yacht picked up
some mail, there was Robbie's weekly letter, a cross between a business man's report and one
of the lamentations of Jeremiah. Robbie said that the Democratic candidate was a man wholly
without business experience, and moreover an invalid, his legs shriveled by infantile paralysis.
Surely these times called for one at least physically sound; the presidency was a mankilling job,
and this Roosevelt, if elected, couldn't survive it for a year. But he wasn't going to be elected,
for Robbie and his friends were pulling off their coats, to say nothing of opening their purses.
"I suppose Robbie will be asking you for a contribution!" chuckled the irreverent son, and
the other replied: "I have many interests in America." Lanny recalled the remark he had once
heard Zaharoff make: "I am a citizen of every country where I have investments."
III
They discussed conditions in Germany, living on borrowed capital and sliding deeper and
