“Did he tell you that was his idea?”
Lanny saw the puddle in his path, and sidestepped it. “I got that impression, but of course I may have been mistaken.”
“Well, it wasn’t his idea. I told him I was planning to do it, and he offered to write some of the copy for me—always for a good price. He is a clever chap, but don’t let him give you the notion that he is in command of the battle to save America.”
VIII
Returning from Chicago, Lanny found the highway blocked by a paving job, and, making a detour, he came upon a sign: “Welcome to Reubens: A Friendly Town.” A memory stirred. “Reubens, Reubens? Where have I heard of Reubens, Indiana?” Across some fields he saw a two-story brick factory of considerable size, and running along the top of it in large letters: “Bluebird Soap Is the Housewife’s Delight.” So Lanny didn’t have to search his mind any longer; memories came pouring in: memories of a trim white yacht that looked as if it had just been scrubbed with kitchen soap, both inside and out; memories of the blue Mediterranean and its so varied shores; of Naples with its lovely bay full of stinks and its ancient streets swarming with beggars; of the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sang; of the ruined temples and the shepherds with their conical huts built of brush; of Marcel Detaze painting his pictures, and the fashionable ladies and gentlemen playing bridge and dancing on deck, bored by five thousand years of history.
Moved by this return to boyhood, Lanny stopped at a filling station and inquired: “Can you tell me if Mr. Ezra Hackabury lives in this town?” The answer was: “Sure thing. Take the first road to your right and drive about half a mile.” Lanny said: “Is it old Mr. Hackabury?” and the man replied: “He’s plenty old, all right.” As the visitor drove, he figured—Ezra must be seventy-five at least; and would he remember the little boy whom he had taught to pitch horseshoes, and with whom he had climbed the hill called the Acropolis?
Back from the road was a two-story frame house of modest size, set in the shade of maple trees now turned scarlet and yellow. The house, white-painted, was in the style of our forefathers who had invented the scrollsaw and discovered the possibility of cutting out innumerable curlicues of wood and nailing them onto porches and cornices and gables. Keeping these clean and freshly painted cost a good deal, so they were a sign of elegance, and ladies who dwelt in them expected their husbands to dress up to match the houses, and never to be seen outdoors without their coats on.
But Ezra, twice a widower, didn’t have to please any woman. He could put on a blue denim shirt and overalls and go out and rake up the maple leaves from his own front lawn whenever he felt like it. That was what he was doing this afternoon of Indian summer, and the smoke of the burning went up in a tall column in the still air and wavered over the green-shingled roof of the house. He was a big man, but no longer florid as Lanny remembered him; his skin was wrinkled and his cheeks hung in pouches, but there was still the bright twinkle in his eyes. He was the homely, shrewd Middle Westerner, who had once been persuaded to turn yachtsman and had hated it, and now was back on the prairie which he loved.
Lanny got out of his car and came to him, saying: “How do you do, Mr. Hackabury?”—and then waiting, with a little smile of mischief.
The soap manufacturer stopped his work and looked at the visitor. It was somebody he was supposed to know; somebody very well dressed, and with a good car, and a look that said: “See if you can guess!” All right, if it was a game, he would try; he studied the quizzical face, and found something familiar, but it must have been a long time ago—or was he getting old at last? When the visitor said: “I didn’t have a mustache, and I was only about so high”—indicating his chest—the memories came to life, and Ezra exclaimed: “Jiminy crickets!” and “I’ll be durned!” and other phrases from the days of the scrollwork style of architecture.
IX
What a time they had, going back twenty-five years—nearly twenty-six, to be exact. Pitching horseshoes at Bienvenu, and then the long motor ride to Naples, and the cruise of the yacht Bluebird, and the little cakes of soap that Ezra had been accustomed to give away to beggars and peasants who didn’t know what it was. Lanny had thought the old man might perhaps not wish to recall the tragic bust-up of his marriage which had taken place at the harbor of Piraeus; but not so, for time heals all wounds that do not kill. “Whatever became of Edna?” the soapman wanted to know.
“She married her Captain, and I met them a few times in society.”
“I expected she’d be asking me for money, but she never did.”
“They got a good price for the yacht which you left behind, and no doubt he made her take care of the money. They were living at Brighton the last I heard. No doubt the army will have taken him back and given him some desk job.”
They talked about the war for a while. Lanny didn’t say anything about his adventures abroad, for that would have been a long story and he was tired of telling it. He spoke of the business of collecting old masters, and of the work of Marcel Detaze, who was becoming an old master, perhaps was one already. The soapman knew nothing of this development but remembered the painter vividly; Lanny told of his tragic fate in the war, and didn’t forget to mention that he and Beauty had been duly and lawfully married, for he knew what Reubens, Indiana, a friendly town, thought on the subject of French artists and their morals. When he mentioned that he had some of Marcel’s works in the car, including one which had been done on the Bluebird, the old gentleman wanted mightily to see them, and called a servant to bring them in and unwrap them.
So they had a little one-man show; but Lanny didn’t deliver any spiel or try to make a sale. He just enjoyed talking about Marcel and his ways—how tireless he had been in sketching ancient ruins, and shepherds and peasant children and all the sights of the Mediterranean shores. When weather permitted he would sit all day on the deck of the yacht, painting in bright sunshine the bright pictures which were among the world’s treasures. “Who would have thought it!” exclaimed the soapman. “I bought two of them, but they went with the yacht, and I forgot all about them. What would one of these paintings bring now?”
“They vary considerably. These are choice examples and will bring fifteen or twenty thousand dollars each.”
“Jehoshaphat!” exclaimed Ezra. “That beats the soap business! And to think we saw it in the making and had no idea of it!”
“A lot of hard work went into the building of his reputation; but once it’s done, then you’re on easy street.”
“Too bad Marcel couldn’t have lived to see it! But as I remember him, he didn’t care a thing about money. All he wanted was to paint.”
“If he’d been here, he’d have been sitting out there painting your maple trees, and making magic out of your fire and its gray smoke spreading.”
The older man reflected for a space, and then said: “I’d like to own one of those paintings of Greece, just to remind me. You know, I’m a plain old fellow, but I didn’t fail to see something pretty over there, and I had some happy hours in spite of the troubles.”
Lanny replied: “The show will be coming to Cleveland and Detroit and Chicago. When it’s over, I’ll be happy to present you with one of the works.”
“Nonsense!” exclaimed Ezra. “I couldn’t accept such a gift.”
“Don’t forget that you gave me many happy hours, and also my mother and Marcel. You made it possible for many of these paintings to exist.”
“That’s true, and I’m glad to be told it. But I have money, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t pay what anybody else would. I’ll tell you what—let me know about the shows, and I’ll come and pick out half a dozen that I like, and hang them in this house and leave it to the town for an art gallery. I’ll do it, if it’s only to spite my heirs.”
“You don’t get along with your heirs?” inquired the visitor, amused.
“I have three sons who run the business, and I get along with them fairly well, except for the in-laws and the children. The
longer I live the more I decide that it’s the women who make the trouble in the world. If I give a stick of furniture to one of my daughters-in-law, the others go wild with jealousy. And as for the children, who is going to make them work when they don’t have to? If I should pay twenty thousand dollars for a painting, they would never think about anything but getting to own it, and they’d tear it to pieces in the squabble.”
“Don’t let them do that!” said Lanny, entertained, as he had always been with Ezra Hackabury.
“If I had my life to live over again,” reflected the creator of America’s favorite kitchen soap, “I wouldn’t work so hard to make a pile of money for other people to waste. I’d take time off to pitch horseshoes, and maybe even to look at an art show.”
“How often I have heard remarks like that!” remarked the son of Budd-Erling. It had become a sort of theme song of the rich; they expected so much from their money, and somehow or other they were nearly always cheated.
X
When Lanny Budd got back to New York, the President had summoned Congress into extra session and asked it to modify the Neutrality Act to permit American munitions to be sold to belligerent nations for cash and transported by them in their own ships. A furious debate was under way, for both sides knew that the issue was crucial; the destiny of America and indeed of the world would depend upon the decision. If you were willing to see Nazi-Fascism prevail in the world, you had to defeat this measure; if you wanted democracy to survive, this was the way to keep the strangler’s hold from its throat. There were two armies marching on Washington, the pros and the cons, and every legislator was under siege.
Lanny called Forrest Quadratt and said: “I have just come back from seeing Coughlin and the Fords.” The reply was: “Would you come to dinner at Miss van Zandt’s? She would be delighted to have you, and you would meet Ham Fish.”
Lanny agreed to come if invited, and an hour or so later a messenger brought a handwritten invitation to his hotel. It being a pleasant evening, he walked down Fifth Avenue, watching the traffic which had become so great that it was self-defeating—you could get to your destination faster on foot. The lower avenue wasn’t so bad, for the dressmaking trade had emptied its lofts and offices and the streets were nearly empty. Miss Hortensia van Zandt was one of those stubborn old residents who had refused to give way to commercialism; she still clung to her brownstone house and hated the invading hordes who had destroyed the dignity of her neighborhood. In years prior to that it had been a Dutch farm, and Miss van Zandt’s grandfather and her father had refused to sell a foot of it; she herself had honored the tradition, with the result that her agent collected enormous rentals from tall office buildings crowded together where once a herd of Holstein cows had peacefully grazed.
The mistress of this fortune was tall, thin, white-haired, and clad in a long black silk dress; she lived as she had in girlhood, when her lover had been killed riding to hounds in the wild country called the Bronx. Year after year she had watched first the publishing business and then the clothing business invading her neighborhood and driving the decent people uptown. Her forefathers had fought the Red Indians, and now she was fighting the Red Jews; she regarded their headquarters in Union Square, half a dozen short blocks away, as a hostile fortress, and fully expected the day when the hate-maddened creatures would come forth with arms in their hands to expropriate her family mansion and turn it into a free-love center. She gave large sums to avert this calamity, and her home was a gathering place for every sort of person who knew or pretended to know how to crush Bolshevism.
Her dining room was paneled in dark walnut and lighted by old-style chandeliers with dangling crystal prisms. There was a huge sideboard with an elaborate silver “service,” and they were waited upon by an elderly man in black knee breeches and pumps. At the table sat two other ladies, one a cousin even older than the hostess, the other an elderly secretary; to keep them company were three gentlemen, a left-handed grandson of a German Kaiser, a left-handed grandson of Budd Gunmakers, and the eminent statesman known as Ham Fish.
It was a peculiar name for a man to carry, and Quadratt reported the man’s remark—that he had lived with it for fifty years and heard all possible jokes about it and didn’t think they were funny. He was properly known as the Honorable Hamilton Fish, Jr., Congressman from the Twenty-sixth New York district. He came of an old family of landowners in the Hudson River Valley; his father had been Congressman before him and his grandfather had been in the two cabinets of President Grant. A big six-footer who had played football with éclat at Harvard, he was heavy-featured, with beetling dark eyebrows. Lanny had been told that he was stupid; now, watching him and listening to him, the P.A. decided that Ham knew exactly what he wanted and was fighting for it with energy and ability.
He had wealth and he believed in wealth and its right to rule the world. He believed that men of wealth were trained for management, and that the greedy and ignorant mob had to be forced or tricked into obedience. In short, he was an old-style English Tory transported to Dutchess County, New York, where his forefathers had established an eighteenth-century “rotten borough.” The three counties which composed the district were agricultural and their towns were small; the wealthy farmers, many of them “gentlemen farmers,” meaning that they did no work, were all Republicans, and they put up the funds and maintained a smooth-running political machine. The “courthouse crowd” knew how to see to the getting out of the voters and the counting of the ballots, and so Ham was serving his eleventh term in the House. Oddly enough, his district was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own, containing the village of Hyde Park. “That Man” could carry the United States of America, but he could never carry Dutchess County!
In a pluto-democracy, politics is the art of outwitting the voters, so the Honorable Ham would never say that he hated the labor unions and proposed to keep them down. What he said was that the Reds were plotting to seize America. Some fifteen years ago he had got himself appointed chairman of a committee to investigate the Communists. His definition of this word was rather vague, and included everybody who proposed any sort of change calculated to reduce the gulf between the rich and the poor. Ham had traveled the breadth of America putting such persons on the witness stand and browbeating and ridiculing them in his heavy-handed way. He had expected to become President on the basis of that public service, and it was a source of infinite annoyance to him that his Democratic constituent, the Squire of Krum Elbow, had managed to shove in ahead of him.
XI
The patriotic Congressman had an interesting story to tell to the guests at this frugal dinner. He had just come back from a visit to Europe, in the course of which he had called upon the leading statesmen and told them his views. He had publicly stated his belief that Germany’s claims were just, and had recommended a thirty-day truce in which the quarrel with Poland might be adjudicated. Now, of course, the stubborn Poles were paying the penalty for having refused the advice. Ham had been a guest of Ribbentrop in Schloss Fuschl, which the wine salesman had expropriated from a Jew—but perhaps Miss van Zandt in her Schloss Fifth Avenue was not aware of that detail. Fuschl was not far from Berchtesgaden, and Lanny said: “I was there only a couple of days after you left.” But Ham did not follow up this lead; perhaps it would have detracted from his own prestige, and he needed all he could get right now. It was a time of desperate peril, which the humorless and heavy-featured ex-fullback had been predicting for a long time.
“If Roosevelt succeeds in driving this bill through, we shall find ourselves in the, war inside of a year,” he announced, and the three old ladies shuddered as one. They had hastened to join and support the various “mothers’” organizations, even though they had no sons or grandsons to be saved. Ham told of another organization which he and other Congressmen had formed, and which they were calling by a large name: National Committee to Keep America out of Foreign Wars. A curious circumstance which Lanny had unearthed in Detroit—the Communists were joining this committee!
They, too, had become pacifists all of a sudden! But of course he wouldn’t mention this; he would listen respectfully while the Honorable Ham told of the speech he was going to deliver in the House and of the radio talk he would like to give if the money could be raised. He delivered a good part of both between the bouillon and the coffee, and the rest in the upstairs drawing-room with old-fashioned horsehair sofas and “what-nots” and a coal-grate fire to keep the autumn chill out of the bones of three elderly spinsters.
The Kaiser’s grandson sat by, accompanying the orator like a drummer accenting the rhythms of a saxophone, nodding and smiling approval of every sentence, and now and then ejaculating “Good!” or “Exactly so!” or something of the sort. Quadratt knew just what it cost to have speeches printed by the Government Printing Office, and he explained that the saving of America was purely a question of whether or not the Congressman’s golden words could be placed in the hands of a sufficient number of voters. When Miss van Zandt wrote a check for five thousand dollars, the German-American seemed as happy as if it had been payable to him personally, instead of to the Committee with a name so long that the secretary had difficulty in getting it into the space on the check.
Quadratt had “got his” only a few days earlier, so he whispered to Lanny. He had already mentioned how he had paid money to Fish’s secretary in Washington, a man named Hill, to ship out Nazi literature under Fish’s frank. Lanny embodied this fact in a report to F.D.R., suggesting that this might come under the recent law requiring foreign agents to register their activities with the State Department. Lanny added: “A grand jury ought to try to find out whether Fish knew anything about this.” But he didn’t venture to ask Fish himself!
25
On with the Dance
I
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