II
She was afraid that Lanny would be disturbed by all this uproar in the home which had always been his; but he told her he couldn’t have stayed in any case, he had to go to London, and then to New York; the war wasn’t going to make any difference to him, so far as traveling was concerned. It was difficult to explain this, for it made a difference to everybody else; he had to tell her that he was getting important information for his father, who was engaged in the greatest gamble of his life. You couldn’t make planes without materials, and if you bought great quantities, and then the war ended suddenly, you would be sunk. The mother exclaimed: “Tell me, for God’s sake!—how long is it going on?”
He had to say: “From all that I can make out, a long time.”
“Lanny, I said I couldn’t stand to live through another war!”
“I know, darling; but you chose a bad time to be born, and a bad time for your son.”
“You’re not going to get into it, Lanny!”
“No, I have no heart for it. They will fight to a stalemate, and nobody will gain.” That was his role; it was what he told his rich and important friends, including his mother; he was the art expert and merchant of death, never the politician or the tool of such.
“Travel is so dangerous now!” she exclaimed. She was always pleading with him to stay at home and play—surely he had earned the right. It was her dream to find him a wife, and have him settle down in this spot, as lovely as any upon earth, and provide her with more grandchildren, some that would be hers to supervise and to spoil. Surely they had money enough for all! No sooner did Lanny arrive than there would appear at the family luncheon table, or at tea or dinner, some lovely damsel whose family was of social importance somewhere in the world; Beauty would drop hints about it, and Lanny would be his gracious self to the visitor, but afterwards he would say: “You are wasting your time, old dear! What I need to meet are the people who can tell me things that Robbie will be asking when I see him.”
Up in the fashionable hills above Cannes was the estate of Lanny’s near-godmother, Emily Chattersworth. Her health was failing, so she had an excuse for not crowding up her place with refugees as Beauty had done; but she had admitted a few carefully chosen friends, and these were persons who, if you got them off in a corner, might tell you the secret clauses of the armistice with Germany, or that with Italy. If her kind and much-loved Lanny were to ask the favor, she would invite some diplomat on vacation or some member of a royal house, who would reveal to him what Spain was up to in Tangier, or how the Fascist intrigue was succeeding in Iraq. Or it might be some great industrialist who knew the status of negotiations with Hitler over the postwar disposition of Lorraine iron ore. It was upon such matters that the peace terms would really depend, and the son of Budd-Erling would say, tactfully and cautiously: “My father is deeply interested in international affairs, as you know; but apart from that, I am a personal friend of the Führer and of Reichsmarschall Göring, and it may be that the next time I see them I can put in a word for your point of view.” The important person would know about this art expert’s wide acquaintance, for it had been talked about up and down the Coast of Pleasure, and no doubt the wise Emily would have reminded the important person over the telephone when she invited him to call.
III
The poet Heber had written: “Though every prospect pleases, and only man is vile …” Lanny looked about him at this landscape, so familiar, so bound up with the memories of all his days. The blue-green water of the Golfe Juan, varying in the shallows and with every change of the weather; the bright blue sky, with billowing white clouds; the red Estérels in the distance, with the sun going down behind them; the gray rocky points with straggly cedars and pine trees growing precariously; the flower-covered fields of the Cap—yes, one might be glad to spend several lifetimes amid this scenery.
But the people! Lanny tried to be charitable, but every time he saw them they seemed worse to him. People who had got money by hook or by crook, and had come here to enjoy their pleasures, at no matter what cost to others and to the human society; the wasters of all Europe, ravenous for their animal satisfactions, for gobbling costly foods and guzzling rare wines, for copulating on silken couches, for covering their flesh with delicate fabrics and decorating themselves with the furs of animals, the feathers of birds, and gems from the bowels of the earth. If they had been mere animals one would not have been so distressed by them, any more than by the sight of birds picking up bugs or hogs rooting for truffles in the forests; what made them revolting was that it was all the appurtenances of civilization, the symbols of culture they were debasing to their animal purposes. They called themselves elegant, smart, the salt of the earth; they had a score of fancy French phrases for themselves, they were chic, très snob, the crême de la crême; they were the haut monde, the grand monde, the monde d’élite.
They had the means to gratify every fancy; they had the stuff, the mazuma, the long green, the spondulix; in every one of the dozen languages you might hear on this Côte d’Azur they had intimate names for the deity they worshiped, the thing by which they lived, the foundation upon which their culture was built. If you had inherited it from your father and a long line of ancestors, so much the better; but anyhow, you had got it, and you hadn’t been caught, so now you could have whatever you wanted, the world was your oyster. You were surrounded by people who were trying to get it away from you, but you knew how to take care of yourself and make them earn what they got. They danced attendance, they bowed before you, they flattered you and licked your boots; they spread out their wares and sang the praises thereof—whether it was food or raiment, music or poetry or painting. Men or women, young or old, black or white, if they did not have the money they were your inferiors and did what you told them, and learned to smile and like it, according to the American slang.
To Lanny Budd, the sociologist, it had been apparent from youth that this was one more case of the decay of a civilization. He had read Volney’s Ruins of Empire, and knew that this had been going on since the dawn of history, that in truth history had been nothing but that: vast human societies arising and flaunting their glory, certain of their permanence and the favor of their gods, then slowly falling to pieces, like a great tree in a forest, which is attacked by rot, by fungus and parasites and borers, until at last it can no longer sustain its own weight. Was it a doom of nature or of God? Or were there causes of this evil which could be studied and remedies which could be applied?
To Lanny it seemed clear that the trouble lay in the social system; in exploitation and speculation which bred great fortunes, and in inheritance which made parasitism and perpetuated it. Every empire of the past had been based upon the private ownership of land and other privileges; men enjoyed wealth which they had not earned and power which they were no longer competent to wield; luxury on the one hand and penury on the other bred class strife which tore the society to pieces and exposed it to its foes.
Here it was, history repeating itself; and the extraordinary thing, how few people understood or cared about it. These refugees from a score of lands, including the sweet land of liberty overseas, talked politics and war incessantly, but when you listened you discovered that what they were thinking about was their own comfort, the preservation of the system which made their own lives so easy. What was going to happen to the “market”?—by which they meant the stocks and bonds from which their incomes were derived. If the Nazis won—and nine people out of ten were sure they had already won—what sort of government would they set up in France and how soon would it be before things got back to normal?—by which was meant labor getting back to work and dividends flowing in. Thank God, there would be no more unions and strikes, no more front populaire and Red newspapers! And would Hitler wait for a breathing space, or would he go after Russia at once? Such was the conversation of smart society on the French Riviera through this summer of the year 1940.
IV
There are many schools of sociology, also of
philosophy; and difference of opinion, which makes horse races, also made discussions in the drawing-rooms of Bienvenu. Here was Beauty Budd’s son, who believed that human society had to be reconstructed; and here was Beauty Budd’s husband, who was equally sure that nothing could be done to reconstruct society until the individuals which compose it had been improved—or rather, until they had improved themselves. Parsifal Dingle was his unusual name, and he was an Iowa real-estate dealer who had accumulated a modest amount of money and come to live abroad because he wanted to think his own thoughts and couldn’t do it in a small town where all the people knew him and were intrusively sociable. Beauty had married him, but had refused to marry his name; she had kept her own, which was really a professional name, she having been what was called a “professional beauty”—and no pun about it.
Parsifal, the man of God, had a rosy cherubic face and hair which had become snow-white since Lanny had known him. He was what was called a “New Thoughter,” though he gave himself no label; he was interested in everything that went on inside the human mind, or soul, or whatever you chose to call it. He had discovered many strange things about it, and was sure it was as truly infinite in extent and content as was the universe of the body, to which astronomers can find no limits at one extreme, nor the investigators of physics and electronics at the other. Parsifal believed there was a spirit inside us, something which maintained us, or, as he preferred to say, perpetually created us; he called it God, but would add, “not God with a beard.”
This force was in every person, in everything, indeed it was everything; and we could use it if we took the trouble; we could find out about this creative mental force in the same way that we had found out about electricity—by trying out experiments and seeing what happened. Parsifal was tireless in experimenting, and as a result had made himself into a kind of saint, a kind entirely new on the Coast of Pleasure, not approved by the church authorities who had taken sanctity as their private domain. Parsifal had found that by laying his hands upon people and concentrating his mind upon the certainty of their healing, he could help them to be healed. He did this, so he claimed, by the power of love, and made it his business to love everybody, regardless of whether they deserved it or not, and whether they wanted it or not. Sooner or later, said this man of God, everybody discovers the need of love, and it can be spread by example, just as evil is. Parsifal never argued with people, or forced his ideas upon them; he kept his kindness and serenity, and waited for people to ask him questions, which sooner or later they did.
During the great panic of 1929 in New York, while men were throwing themselves out of windows of their office buildings because they had lost everything, Parsifal Dingle had been experimenting with spiritualist mediums, and had discovered an old Polish woman whose spirits had told him things about his own life which she had had no normal way of finding out. They had brought this woman to Bienvenu and she was now one of the family pensioners; every now and then the healer would have a séance with her, and had many notebooks full of the things which her “spirit controls” had told him. Whenever Lanny visited his boyhood home, he would sit down with his stepfather and go over these notes and discuss them. Lanny’s own experiments had been many, and if the pair had seen fit to constitute themselves the Juan Society for Psychical Research, they might have made quite an impression in the metaphysical world.
V
At the present time it was hard to get the necessary quiet in Bienvenu. Lanny waited until the elderly couple who were camping out in back of his studio had gone off to a reception—borrowing one of Beauty’s cars. Then he escorted the Polish medium to the studio and placed her in the armchair to which she was accustomed; she sat back and closed her eyes, moaned lightly for a minute or two, and then was still. There came from her lips a deep man’s voice, proclaiming that it came from Tecumseh, Amerindian chieftain long-since dead; he announced that Sir Basil Zaharoff was there—“the old gentleman with the guns going off all round him.” Lanny sighed inwardly, for the munitions king who had been Robbie Budd’s partner had become the greatest bore of Lanny’s psychic life; he came uninvited and talked at length, and it had been several years since he had had anything of significance to say. He was a great worrier and prophet of calamity; just now he was insisting that Lanny should pay a thousand pounds which Sir Basil had owed to a man in Monte Carlo; but when Lanny asked how he was to get the money, the Knight Commander became vague and faded out.
Then there was announced Lanny’s grandfather, Samuel Budd, onetime President of Budd Gunmakers in Connecticut. It had been some time since this stern old Puritan had bothered with his left-handed grandson, who had been shown the light in a Sunday-school Bible class but had refused to follow it. Whenever Grandfather came, it was to issue some rebuke, and now he wanted to know when Lanny was going to give up his idler’s way of life and marry again and stay married. The good-for-nothing answered evasively, and in his secret heart was pleased to learn that the old gentleman thought as he did. Lanny surely didn’t want any rumors going about in the spirit world that he was a secret agent of Franklin D. Roosevelt, posing as a Nazi-Fascist sympathizer and turning in reports about the doings of the Axis schemers!
The aged merchant of death faded out on a Bible text—nearly always the Hebrew Old Testament, which is full of fighting men and their weapons and war cries. There followed a long silence, and then a gentle old lady’s voice with a trace of southern accent: the grandmother of Lanny’s friend Laurel Creston. The old lady had been cross with the Budd scion for being what she called a bad influence in Laurel’s life; very few seemed to approve of Lanny in the spirit world, and Tecumseh, the “control,” was crossest of all. Now, however, Mrs. Marjorie Kennan, one-time resident of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, revealed that her granddaughter was in New York, and also that this granddaughter was a medium, and could be communicated with directly. The refined and well-mannered “spirit” was fair enough to acknowledge that Lanny had been responsible for this discovery, and she thanked him. Lanny asked how Laurel was getting along, and Mrs. Kennan reported that she was well, and that she was writing all the time but wouldn’t tell what she was writing about; the grandmother tried slyly to find out if Lanny knew, but Lanny could only guess and didn’t do that out loud. Instead, he asked how spirits were able to fly from Juan to New York and back again without airplane fares; the answer was that there was no such thing as space in the spirit world. When he asked to have that elucidated, he was told that he would understand it when he himself had “passed over.” It was a favorite alibi of that other world.
There was nothing evidential in this séance; but Lanny wrote it out, as he had promised his stepfather, because Parsifal insisted that many things which didn’t seem evidential at the time might turn out to be so in the light of later developments. Parsifal himself never questioned the reality of the spirits; they fitted in perfectly with his theory that fundamentally all minds were one, and that time and space were illusions of our senses. Thus he encouraged the spirits, and got along in brotherly love with the Iroquois chieftain who shepherded them and interpreted for them with perfect savoir-faire. But Lanny could never give up the notion that these communications might be products of the subconscious mind of himself and others. He would argue: “I knew that Laurel was in New York and I knew that she was writing; and Laurel knows all about her grandmother.” All the same, it would be interesting to tell Laurel about this séance, and find out if her grandmother’s spirit had as yet made an appearance in New York!
VI
These developments were dutifully reported to Lanny’s mother, and her reactions had nothing to do with metaphysics. Said Beauty Budd: “Are you corresponding with Laurel Creston?”
“I wrote her a note, to tell her that I expected to be in New York.”
“Has she written to you?”
“Mails are uncertain nowadays, and there may be something waiting for me in London.”
This was an obvious evasion, and Beauty Budd had been in
the world longer than her son, and was not to be fooled by any of his tricks. “Have you had any letter from her at all?”
“Just a brief note, darling, telling me that she was settled and at work. She thanked me for our hospitality, and said that she was writing the same to you.”
“I received that note. She is an intelligent woman, and just your sort, I suppose. How much are you interested in her?”
“I am deeply interested in her, both as a writer and a trance medium; but I’m not in love with her, if that is what you mean.” He knew perfectly well that that was what she always meant.
“Lanny, I can’t understand you. You are keeping things from your mother, and what is the reason for it?”
“Bless your heart, old dear—you can’t understand because you don’t want to. I am interested in my work, and not interested in getting married. I tried it once, and discovered that it’s all right for those who like it, but not for me.”
Beauty had said every possible word there was to say on this subject, but that didn’t keep her from saying it all again. Lanny kissed her on her well-rounded cheek and tickled her gently under the ample chin which distressed her when she looked into the mirror. “Why should I want a wife,” he demanded, “when I have a mother to tell me everything I need to know?”
Of course no woman is going to let herself be diverted by devices so transparent. “Tell me,” persisted Beauty, “are you corresponding with Lizbeth Holdenhurst?”
“I wrote her a sort of bread-and-butter letter, and I’ve written to her father several times. I’ve had to, in connection with the handling of the Detaze paintings. I tell him news from Europe that I think will interest him.”
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