o 3b3e7475144cf77c

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