Lanny answered the questions, and asked those which the younger Denis would have wanted to ask. Charlot was a capitaine in the Lègion Tricolore, maintaining order on the French Riviera, and living—of all places in the world!—in Bienvenu, Lanny’s old home. He had written his father, explaining that he had picked out this place for commandeering, so that he would be able to see that it was protected. Lanny promised that before he left Paris he would write a letter to Charlot, saying that this was good news and thanking him.
And then the two wives: they were well, and the children were well, and life in the old place was going as usual, though of course there was apprehension as to what might be coming later. There were few portions of the old Continent free from that apprehension. Denis said he didn’t get out to the château very often; business kept him in Paris. He offered to take Lanny, but the other said his schedule did not permit it; the truth was, he didn’t want to meet those women and have to answer questions about the husbands, now on opposite sides of a war. The women had dutifully accepted the near-Fascist views of their families in the old days; were they divided now, and if so, how did they manage to live in the same red-brick château, direct the same kitchen—commodious but without modern conveniences—and the same garden with fruit trees trained against its walls?
The visitor told of meeting the two sons alternately and trying to explain each to the other, but in vain. What did the father think, and what should Lanny tell the sons about his political views? The old man hedged—what else could he do? These were terrible times; the Führer was carrying out his publicly declared policy of seeing that every people in Europe starved before the Germans did. He wanted to make friends of the French, but he also wanted their wine and fruit and wheat and oil, to say nothing of munitions and machinery; when these two motives clashed, it was generally the latter which prevailed, so said the head of this wealthy and prominent family. “It would appear that I backed the wrong horse,” he admitted. “You Americans have behaved well in North Africa, and I have no doubt you will behave equally well with us, provided there is anything left of us when you get here.”
“Is that the way your friends feel, Denis?”
“It is the way all men of property feel. We are helpless in the hands of one army, and shall be helpless in the hands of the other when it comes. We can only sit and wait.”
It was an aged man speaking, one who had learned caution in a hard school. He was too shrewd to accept his friend’s reasons for being in Paris; he must have guessed that Lanny was on one side or the other, and if Lanny didn’t choose to say which, that was his privilege. Denis was taking care of his own; that had been his business, also his politics, and he wasn’t going to change at this late day in the midst of this paralyzing confusion. If his sons, and perhaps his daughters-in-law, had got on opposite sides—well, that was part of the confusion, and one reason more for keeping quiet.
There was another subject, the most delicate in the world. The elder son had besought Lanny to bring him word about the old gentleman’s “unfortunate entanglement”; Lanny said, with as much delicacy as he could command. “The boy is very unhappy because of rumors he has heard that you are involved in a situation which may cause you trouble and at the same time endanger the family inheritance.”
The elder didn’t bat an eyelash. He was a Frenchman, and he knew all the plain words in his own language. “Lanny,” he said, “remind my boys that I have been a widower for sixteen years and might as well have been for many years before that. I had the sense to find out what I needed. Now I am at an age where sexual satisfaction is difficult to obtain, and when I find a woman who can give it to me and is willing to take the trouble, I know what she is worth to me and I pay her accordingly. I have seldom in my life paid too much for anything, and my sons should have confidence in my business judgment. Assure them that I am not yet in my dotage.”
Lanny thought that the way to take that was with a chuckle. “Bien, cher ami,” he said; but he wouldn’t be any more sure of Denis’s story than Denis was of Lanny’s.
XV
The P.A. wrote the promised letter to Charlot, saying that he hoped he was comfortable in his new home and promising to come and visit him some day. Also he wrote the Führer what the English-speaking world knows as a “bread-and-butter letter,” thanking him for his hospitality and telling him that, from what a visitor had been able to gather, Frenchmen of great affairs were reasonably satisfied with the treatment they were getting from Germany, and that production was under full headway, which is what all businessmen like. These duties done, he took his SS escort on a tour of the art shops to see what the French painters were doing under the Führer’s protection. Then they dined, and went to a cinema, where they saw a German picture and a French, and compared the hearty sentimentality of the former with the crime passionnel of the latter. “Of course the French are what they are, and the Germans cannot change them,” said Lanny in his best German.
In the morning he was put on board the plane for Madrid, and from there he sent a cablegram to his father, saying that he would arrive in Lisbon the next day and desired two days in London and then home. This message was addressed to “Robert Budd, President, Budd-Erling Aircraft Corporation, Newcastle, Connecticut”—this for the benefit of censors, Spanish, British, and American. The arrangement was that Robbie would notify Baker, also Laurel. Baker would make arrangements, and Lanny would have a seat on the next plane to England, something for which long lines of ordinary folk were waiting in vain.
The P.A. succeeded in getting a plane to Lisbon that afternoon, and he gave up his plan to call on his old friend, General Aguilar, in Madrid. The Americans were no longer afraid that Franco’s Army might fall upon their left flank in North Africa; the pudgy little martinet had seen that the wind was blowing strongly from the west, and all that F.D.R. was concerned about now was to limit the amount of tungsten that Hitler could get from Spain. The way to do that was to pay higher prices, and the bidding was terrific.
Arriving in the city by the Tagus, muddy-brown like the Tiber, Lanny put up at the Avenida Palace Hotel and sent a duplicate cablegram by way of precaution. He enjoyed a bath and a good dinner—Portugal offered every luxury to those who had the price, and piteous starvation to those who didn’t. He took a stroll on the broad Avenida da Liberdade and purchased London newspapers a week old and New York papers three weeks old, but full of news for a man just out of Axisland. He read himself sleepy with them.
He had to control his impatience, for cablegrams might be long delayed in these times. He breakfasted, and read the morning papers—Portuguese was easy if you knew Spanish, French, and Italian. He strolled in hot and languid Lisbon and resisted the efforts of spies from half a dozen lands, including even Japan, to strike up an acquaintance and worm out his secrets. After four days wasted he was just starting an effort to call Baker on the transatlantic telephone when a message was brought to his room. He had a seat reserved the next morning on a seaplane, and he went down to the harbor to inspect it and make sure that everything was OK. When the flying boat lifted itself from the waters of the Tagus estuary, he wished the afflicted old Continent no harm, but he was glad to get away from it and thought with delight of meeting a few persons to whom he could speak the truth.
8
Pathways East and West
I
Lanny was wondering what he was going to do, arriving in Britain from enemy lands. But the all-remembering Baker had attended to that also. Lanny was relieved when he saw his friend Fordyce of B4, the British Intelligence Service, waiting for him at the dock. The Armed Forces of the two nations had become one and were working together in all departments. Fordyce shook hands with the mysterious arrival, and without customs or other formalities whisked him out of sight.
They were taking a plane to London; and on the way to the airfield the friendly Englishman remarked, “I have news that may surprise you. You are flying to Quebec.”
“Am I?” said Lanny, surprised inde
ed.
“There is something going on there, rather secret, so don’t say where you are bound. It is known as Operation Quadrant.”
“I hope we are not taking Canada,” replied Lanny.
“Our forces to oppose you left a couple of days ago,” said the Englishman, returning the smile. “It will be a great fight.”
“What am I supposed to do when I arrive?”
“Baker will be at the Château Frontenac, and you are to call him there. We were told that you wanted two days in London, so I arranged for you to be flown by way of Iceland, three days from today, early in the morning. Will that be convenient?”
“Thank you, I will make it so. There is one matter in which you might oblige me. I have a little daughter in England, thirteen years old; she lives with her mother in Wickthorpe Castle. I have been planning to take her for a visit to my father in Connecticut. Do you suppose it would be possible to get me two passages instead of one? I will pay for hers, of course.”
The B4 man said, “There is always more traffic from America than there is returning.”
“Let it rest until I phone you tomorrow,” replied the other. “I have to make sure that it will be agreeable to Lady Wickthorpe.”
II
The ex-husband had never failed to call up Irma and make sure that his presence at the Castle would be welcome. He had never been able to let her know when he was coming, and little Frances could never have an idea when her delightful father would descend out of the sky—quite literally in a fiery chariot, even though it was “internal combustion.” She was told that he purchased paintings, but she had rarely seen any of them.
Irma said, as she always did, “Oh, good! Come right out. Frances will be so glad.” Six or seven years had passed since she and Lanny had got their divorce, and they were holding to the determination to carry it off in the modern manner, without fuss or hard feelings. Frances must know that her mother and her father were friends, and likewise her father and her stepfather. Everything in her life must be gracious and serene; only common, low-class people ever quarreled, or drank too much, or used bad language, and wars were fought only against peoples which did not have Anglo-Saxon standards of good manners.
Lanny took the next train out of London, just in time to miss a “tip-and-run” raid by the Luftwaffe. Göring had accumulated sufficient forces for a few such attacks, and it was important to assure the German people that the British were being paid back for what they were doing to German cities. The train was crowded, and the passengers heard the sound of the bombs while passing out of the suburbs northwest of London. Lanny was interested to observe how much as a matter of course they took the event; few stopped the reading of their little four-page evening papers. In the compartment with Lanny was a girl of five or six, an age which meant that war was her natural environment. She looked up at her mother and asked a question which would stay in Lanny’s mind for the rest of his life: “Mummy, was the bombing as bad as this in peacetime?”
Frances was at the station with her little basket pony cart. She ran to greet him, but not too exuberantly—she was becoming a dignified young lady now, carefully repressed by a mother and a grandmother from Long Island. Nearly half a year had passed since Lanny had seen the child, and she was approaching the age where changes come quickly. She had lived on this great estate where there was never a shortage of food, and where the war had been far-off thunder or the chatter of machine guns high up in the air. She had been taught that it was all in the order of nature and that she mustn’t let it trouble her too much; she mustn’t let anything trouble her, for she was one who, in the phrase of Kipling, had “inherited that good part.” She had rosy cheeks, a trim figure, dark brown eyes and hair—she was going to be the same brunette beauty that her mother had been when, at the age of nineteen, a great heiress, she had picked the grandson of Budd Gunmakers for her mate.
A trustworthy groom, a war cripple, sat in a little high seat in the back of the basket. Frances drove, and Lanny squeezed his long legs in beside her. She bubbled over with pleasure at seeing him and, as always, plied him with questions as to where he had been and what he had done. He couldn’t mention either Italy or Germany, so he told about Florida; she knew that he was married again, and he talked about his baby boy, and about the pelicans and the bright-colored fishes and the diving for sponges; also about his visit to North Africa, and to Frances’s other grandmother, whose memory must not be allowed to grow dim in the child’s mind. Also, there was her little cousin, Marcel Detaze, who lived in such romantic surroundings, a palatial hotel in an oasis of the African desert, with date palms and orange groves all around it, tremendous snow-capped mountains behind it, and British and French and American soldiers, white-clad Moors, and other strange people inside it.
Frances was old enough now to have dinner with the grownups; she would sit quietly and only speak when she was addressed. There were two members of the “county families” who had been invited at short notice, and the little girl observed that they had come to hear what her wonderful father had to say. She did not miss a word, because she had been taught that ladies of the English ruling class took an important part in public affairs; she might some day find herself the wife of a cabinet minister, or even of a prime minister.
She did not hear anything about Operation Quadrant, now getting under way in Quebec, but she heard about Operation Husky, now nearing completion at the northeastern corner of Sicily. It would be only a few days before the last of the enemy had been driven across the narrow Strait of Messina—they could go in rowboats if necessary. Everybody wanted to know if the Allies would follow them to the mainland, and how far they would go. Englishmen who had to stay at home naturally wondered how an American art expert could carry on his business in war-torn lands, and they would have been stupid indeed if they had not guessed that he had some sort of mission: Being well-bred and well-instructed, they wouldn’t hint at such an idea.
Lanny, for his part, was interested to observe how the Wickthorpe set, once so militant, had been tamed by events; they still disliked Jews, and were still certain that someday we should need the help of the capable and vigorous Germans in putting down the Reds; but they confined their peace talk to criticism of the unconditional surrender formula, and confessed sadly that nobody paid any attention to their wishes. Lanny was amused by the thought of what a sensation he could have caused by telling them that he had just come from Hitler. He had promised Hitler to tell them; but he wasn’t keeping promises to Hitler.
III
In the morning the visitor was taken for a tour of the estate, at least the parts that were nearest. Every square foot that could be spared was growing food of some sort, and everything was in the full green of mid-summer; Ceddy, the host, boasted that this onetime showplace was now almost paying its way. He meant before taxes, of course; he couldn’t possibly have kept it together if it hadn’t been for Irma’s fortune. The Castle itself, dating from Elizabethan days, had outlasted many wars, and inside it had all been made over, both elegant and comfortable. Irma, loving her role of great lady, saw to it that everything was kept in order, even with none but old people for servants.
The fourteenth Earl of Wickthorpe was about Lanny’s age, but showed his years more; his blond hair was beginning to be scarce on top and his closely trimmed golden mustache had traces of gray. He worried a great deal about the war, and still more about what was going to happen after it. A country gentleman, he hated and feared industrialism even while he enjoyed its products and the income his wife derived from the street railways of the Middle West. Lanny had the idea that Ceddy would have liked it better if the work of the world could be done by bands of well-trained chimpanzees instead of the slum denizens who, his Lordship was convinced, were planning to rise and take possession of England when this war was over.
Nothing to be done about it; so cultivate your acres, and let your wife reinvest her income in America, and train your sons and heirs to make the best of whatever might come to
them. Lanny renewed his acquaintance with a sturdy rosy-cheeked youngster aged five who bore the title of Viscount and the name of James Ponsonby Cavendish Cedric Barnes Masterson. He was called Jimmy, and his brother, two years younger, the Honorable Gerald Cedric Barnes Masterson, was called Jerry. Also, Lanny would not fail to pay a courtesy call on the redoubtable Mrs. Fanny Barnes, his ex-mother-in-law, who was just as glad to see him as if he had been a tarantula, but who was compelled by circumstances to pretend to admire him; also on her brother, “Uncle Horace,” who had two ideas about the visitor, that he might be lured into playing a game of contract, and that he might take some tips on the stock market and let the tipster in on a share of his winnings—but not of his losses.
Both mother and daughter knew what Lanny had in mind, for he had talked it over with Irma the last time. Fanny had been doing her best to make Irma promise to say no, but Irma wasn’t in position to say it, and Fanny had consulted a lawyer and made certain that no British court would refuse to recognize a father’s right to partial custody of his child. Irma had had the child all the time since the divorce, and now surely the father could claim his turn. And besides, it mustn’t be allowed to get into the courts; they were friends, and Lanny’s arguments must be met fairly.
IV
The pair had their conference in the library of the Castle, while the grandmother sat chafing in her little cottage, for Frances was her chief happiness in life, and she said it was like waiting to be told that she was to have her eyes cut out. Lanny was explaining to his ex-wife the danger which hung over the English people. “I cannot tell you how I know; you must take my word that I do. Hitler is speaking the truth when he says he has a new weapon; whether he is right in the idea that it will give him victory I can’t say, but I know that he believes it and is turning a great part of German science and industry to perfecting and producing this weapon.”
One Clear Call I Page 22