Beauty Budd would fling her arms about her boy and cry: “Oh, Lanny, don’t ever let them get you into a war!” And then one day she received a letter which made her heart stand still:
“Chérie: Your visit shines as the most precious jewel of my memory. The news which I have to tell will make you sad, I fear—but be courageous for my sake. Your coming was the occasion of my having the opportunity to make the acquaintance of my commandant, and being able to volunteer for special service. I am being sent elsewhere to receive training, concerning which it is not permissible for me to write. For the present you may address me in care of l’École Supérieure d’Aéronautique at Vincennes.
“Your love is the sunshine of my life, and knows neither clouds nor night. I adore you. Marcel.”
13
Women Must Weep
I
It was going to be some time before Lanny Budd would see his father again. The warring nations would have their “missions” in New York for the purpose of buying military supplies; Robbie’s headquarters would be there, and he would make a great deal of money. The various governments would float bonds in the United States, and persons who believed in their financial stability would buy the bonds, and the money would be spent for everything that was needed by armies. Robbie explained these matters in his letters, and said that England and France had placed enough orders with Budd’s to justify great enlargements of the plant.
Robbie wrote cautiously, being aware that mail would be read by the French censor. “Remember what I told you about your own attitude, and do not let anybody sway you from it. This is the most important thing for your life.” That was enough for Lanny; he did his best to resist the tug of forces about him. Robbie sent magazines and papers with articles that would give him a balanced view; not marking the articles—that would have made it too easy for the censor—but writing him a few days later to read pages so-and-so.
“One thing I was wrong about,” the father admitted. “This war is going to last longer than I thought.” When Lanny read that, the giant armies were locked in an embrace of death on the river Aisne; the French trying to drive the Germans still farther back, the Germans trying to hold on. They fought all day, and at night food and ammunition were brought up in camions and carts, and the armies went on fighting. Battles lasted not days but weeks, and you could hardly say when one ended and the next began. The troops charged and retreated and charged again, fighting over ground already laid waste. They dug themselves in, and when rain filled up the trenches they stayed in them, because it was better to be wet than dead.
It was the same on the eastern front also. The Russian steam roller had made some headway against the Austrians, but in East Prussia it had got stuck in the swampy lands about the Masurian Lakes. The Russians had been surrounded and slaughtered wholesale; but many had got away, and fresh armies had come up and they were pushing back and forth across the border, one great battle after another.
It was going to be that way for a long time—the fiercest fighting, inspired by the bitterest hatreds that Europe had known for centuries. Each nation was going to mobilize its resources from every part of the world; resources of man power, of money, of goods, and of intellectual and moral factors. Each side was doing everything in its power to make the other odious, and neither was going to have any patience with those who were lukewarm or doubting. A mother and son from America who wanted to keep themselves neutral would be buffeted about like birds in a thunderstorm.
II
Traveling by himself to a new post of duty, Marcel was free of censorship for a day or two. He wrote on the train and mailed in Paris an eloquent and passionate love letter, inspired by their recent day and night together. It filled Beauty with joy but also with anguish, for it told her that this treasure of her heart was going to one of the most terrible of all posts of danger. He was to receive several weeks of intensive training to enable him to act as observer in a stationary balloon.
He had suggested this post as one for which his career as a painter fitted him especially. His ability to distinguish shades of color would enable him to detect camouflage. He had studied landscapes from mountain tops, and could see things that the ordinary eye would miss. “You must learn to be happy in the thought that I shall be of real use to my country”—so he wrote, and perhaps really believed it, being a man. What Beauty did was to crumple the letter in her hands, and sink down with her face upon it and wet it with her tears.
After that there was little peace in Bienvenu. Beauty went about with death written on her face; Lanny would hear her sobbing in the night, and would go to her room and try to comfort her. “You chose a Frenchman, Beauty. You can’t expect him to be anything else.” The boy had been reading an anthology of English poetry, which Mr. Elphinstone had left behind when he went home to try to get into the army. Being young, Lanny sought to comfort his mother with noble sentiments expressed in immortal words. “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more.”
So he quoted; but it only seemed to make Beauty mad. “What do you mean, ‘honour’? It’s nothing but the desire of powerful men to rule over others. It’s a trick to get millions of people to follow them and die for their glory.”
Going about the house brooding, did Beauty Budd regret the choice she had made? If so, she didn’t say it to Lanny. What she told him was that life was a thing too cruel to be endured. It could not be that there was a God—the idea was crazy. We were being mocked by some devil, or by a swarm of them—a separate devil in the heart of every man who sought to kill his fellows.
Beauty’s good friend Sophie and her young man, Eddie Patterson, rallied to her support. They brought with them an elderly retired Swiss diplomat who bore the distinguished name of Rochambeau; having been behind the scenes of Europe most of his life, he was not to be deceived by any propaganda, and could not be offended by the antimilitarist utterances of a self-centered American lady. These four played bridge; they played with a kind of desperation, all day and most of the night, stopping only when Leese put a meal upon the table and tapped a little tune on the Chinese gongs that hung by the dining-room door. They played for very small stakes, but took their game with the utmost seriousness, having their different systems of play, and discussing each hand, what they had done and whether some other way might not have been better. They never mentioned, and they tried never to think, how men were being mangled with shot and shell while these fine points of bidding and leading and signaling were being settled.
A convenient arrangement for Lanny, because it set him free to read. Also he could play tennis with boys and girls of the near-by villas, and keep the household supplied with seafood. But he had to promise not to go sailing upon the bay, because of Beauty’s fear that a German submarine might rise up without warning and torpedo the pleasure boats in the Golfe Juan.
III
Lanny kept up a correspondence with his friend Rick, and learned once more how difficult was going to be the role of neutral in this war. Rick said that the way the Germans were behaving in Belgium deprived them of all claim to be considered as civilized men. Rick hadn’t been as much impressed by Kurt’s long words as had Lanny, and he said that anyhow, what was the use of fancy-sounding philosophy if you didn’t make it count in everyday affairs? Rick said furthermore that from now on America’s safety depended on the British fleet, and the quicker the Americans realized it the better for them and for the world.
Lanny was at a disadvantage in these arguments, because he was afraid that if he repeated what his father had told him, the censor wouldn’t allow the letter to pass. So he just mentioned what he was reading, and the sights he was seeing. The French had what was called an “aérohydro,” a plane that could land upon water, and one of them, having sprung an oil leak, had come down by the quay at Juan; Lanny had watched it being repaired, and then had seen it depart. It carried a machine gun, a Hotchkiss—Lanny knew all the types of guns, as other boys knew automobiles. Rick in return told about the London busse
s being made over into “transports” for troops, and about crowds of clerks and businessmen drilling in Hyde Park, still in their civilian clothes, and with only sticks for guns.
But Rick’s principal interest was in the air. He wrote a lot about having met one of the fliers with whom they had talked at Salisbury Plain; this officer had fought a pistol duel in the sky, and had got his German. The British, too, were putting machine guns in their planes; but it was a problem, for most planes had the propeller in front, and that was where you wanted to shoot if you were following an enemy. The idea now was to shoot through the propeller, and the British had devised one with flanges which would turn aside whatever bullets struck its blades.
“That’s the service I’m going into,” said Rick. “But I’ve promised the pater to wait until next year. The age requirement is eighteen, but a lot of the fellows do a little fibbing. I could, because I’m tall. It is hard to do any studying in times like these. No doubt it’s easier for an American.”
Lanny corresponded also with Rosemary Codwilliger—pronounced Culliver. He always felt funny when he wrote that name; but he knew that many English names were queer, especially the fashionable ones; the owners carefully preserved this queerness as a form of distinction, as one way of showing that they didn’t care a hang whether anybody agreed with them about the way to spell, or to pronounce, or to do anything else. It did not occur to Lanny that people like that might be difficult to get along with in other ways; all he remembered was that Rosemary was delightful to look at, and how sweet it had been to sit with his arms around her in the moonlight.
He didn’t write anything about that. They exchanged placid and friendly letters that would make proper reading for both censors and parents. She said that her father was commanding a regiment somewhere in France, and that her mother’s nephew, the Honorable Gerald Smithtotten, had been killed after holding the Condé Canal near Mons against seven enemy attacks. “This war is rather hard on our best families,” explained the daughter of Captain Codwilliger, “because they have to show themselves on the parapets or whatever it is, to set an example for the men. I want to take up nursing, but mother keeps begging me to finish this year’s school. Mothers always think that we are a lot younger than we are really. Are American mothers like that?”
IV
Lanny could not help thinking about Kurt all the time, and wondering what he was doing and thinking. Of course Kurt would be patriotic. Would he blame Lanny for not taking the side of Germany? What reason would he give? Lanny wished he could find out; but of course no letters were allowed to come or go between countries at war.
One day it happened that Lanny was poking into a bureau drawer where he kept handkerchiefs and a fishing reel and some cartridges and photographs and old letters and what not. He picked up a business card and read: “Johannes Robin, Agent, Maatschappij voor Electrische Specialiteiten, Rotterdam.” What a lot had happened in the world since Lanny had talked with that Jewish gentleman on the train last Christmas! “I wonder if I’ll ever see him again,” the boy reflected.
He remembered that he had intended to write to Mr. Robin; and this brought another idea, that possibly the salesman of gadgets might be willing to mail a letter to Kurt for him. Lanny had learned, from the conversation of his mother’s friends, that one could communicate with Germans in this way; it was against the law, but much business was still being carried on by way of neutral countries. “It couldn’t do Mr. Robin any harm,” the boy decided, “because I won’t say anything the censor can object to; I won’t even need to say that I’m in France.”
He sat himself down and composed a letter to his friend in Germany. To set the German censors straight he began:
“My father has told me that it’s an American’s duty to keep neutral, and I am doing it. I don’t want to lose touch with you, so I write to say that I am at home, and that my mother and I are well. My father is back in Connecticut. I am studying hard, reading the best books I can get, and not forgetting the ideals of the nobler life. I am also practicing sight reading, although my piano technique is still mixed up. I have no teachers at present, but my mother has met a young American college man who came over on a cattle boat for the adventure and now thinks he may stay for a while because he has become interested in a young lady who lives near us. He may want to earn some money, so may teach me what he learned at college, if he has not forgotten it. Please give my sincere regards to all the members of your family, and write your affectionate friend, Lanny.”
Certainly that letter could do no injury to any nation at war; and Lanny wrote the salesman in Rotterdam, recalling their meeting on the train and hoping that this would find Mr. Robin well, and that his business had not been too greatly injured by the war. Lanny explained that here was a letter to the friend he had visited in Silesia. Mr. Robin was welcome to read the letter, and Lanny assured him that it contained no war secrets; Mr. Robin would be at liberty to test the paper with lemon juice or with heat—Lanny had been reading and hearing about spies and the way they operated. He hoped that this request would not embarrass Mr. Robin in any way; if it did, he was at liberty to destroy the letter; otherwise would he please mail it in a plain envelope addressed to Kurt Meissner at Schloss Stubendorf, Upper Silesia.
Lanny posted the two letters in the same envelope, and then waited. In due course came a reply from Mr. Robin, cordial as Lanny had expected. Mr. Robin was pleased to take his word about the letter, and would mail future letters if so desired. He recalled his fellow-traveler with pleasure and hoped to meet him again some day. No, the war had not injured his business; on the contrary, he had been able to expand it along new lines, not so different from those of Lanny’s father. Mr. Robin told about his family; he had two little boys, one ten and the other eight, and he took the liberty of enclosing a snapshot, so that Lanny might feel that he knew them.
Lanny studied the picture, which had been taken in the summertime, and showed the family standing at the entrance to a pergola, with a Belgian shepherd dog lying on the ground in front of them. Mr. Robin had on an outing shirt with a soft collar such as Lanny himself wore; Mrs. Robin was stoutish and kind-looking, and the two little boys gazed soberly at Lanny, as if they had known that he was going to be seeing them, and wondered what sort of fellow he might be. They had dark wavy hair like their father, and large, gentle eyes; on the back their names were written, Hans and Freddi, and the information that the former played the violin and the latter the clarinet. Lanny thought once more that he liked the Jews, and asked his mother why they didn’t know any. Beauty replied that she hadn’t happened to meet them; Robbie didn’t like them any too much.
A couple of weeks later came a letter postmarked Switzerland, without the name of any sender. It proved to be from Kurt—evidently he too had some friend whom he trusted. It was in the same cautious tone as Lanny’s. “I am glad to hear about an American’s attitude to present events. You will of course understand that my point of view is different. You are fortunate in being able to go on with your music studies. For me it has become necessary to make preparations for a more active career. Whatever happens, I will always think of you with warm friendship. My soul remains what it has always been, and I count upon yours. I will write you when I can and hope that you will do the same. The members of my family are well at present. All, as you can imagine, are very busy. Those who are at home join me in kindest regards. Kurt.”
Lanny showed this to his mother, and she agreed that Kurt must be preparing for some sort of military service. He was only sixteen, but then the Germans were thorough and began young. His brothers, no doubt, were in the fighting now. Lanny tried to read between the lines; that sentence about his friend’s soul meant to tell him, over the censor’s shoulder, that even though Kurt went to war, he would still believe in the importance of the ideal, and in art as an instrument for uplifting mankind. The war was not going to make any difference in their friendship.
V
Since Kurt was counting upon Lanny’s so
ul, Lanny must be worthy of it. He decided that he spent too much time reading love stories, and should begin at once upon something uplifting. He was wondering what to choose, when he happened to hear M. Rochambeau, the retired diplomat, remark that the priests and bishops who were blessing the instruments of slaughter in the various nations were not very well representing the spirit of Jesus. Lanny reflected that he had seen many pictures of Jesus, and of Jesus’s mother, and of apostles and angels and saints and what not, yet he knew very little about the Christian religion. Both his mother and his father had had it forced upon them in their youth, and hated it. But as a matter of art education, shouldn’t Lanny read up on it?
He asked the white-haired and courtly ex-diplomat where he could find out what Jesus had said, and was reminded that the words were set down in some old books called the Gospels. M. Rochambeau didn’t happen to own a copy, and Beauty’s friends, of whom the boy made inquiry, found the idea amusing. Finally Lanny found in a bookstore a copy of this ancient work.
Winter was coming now. In Flanders and through northern France a million men were lying out in the open, in trenches and shell holes half full of filthy water which froze at night. They were devoured by vermin and half paralyzed by cold, eating bread and canned meat, when it could be brought to them over roads which had been turned into quagmires. All day and night bullets whistled above them and shells came down out of the sky, blowing bodies to fragments and burying others under loads of mud. The wounded had to lie where they fell until death released them, or night made it possible for their fellows to drag them back into the trenches.
And with this going on a few hundred miles away, Lanny was reading the story of Jesus, four times over, with variations. He was deeply touched by it each time, and wept over the way that poor man had been treated, and loved him for the kind and gentle things he had said. If somebody had happened along to speak for one of the religious sects—almost any of them—that person might have made a convert. As it was, Lanny had no one to consult but a worldly-wise ex-diplomat, who told him that if he wanted to follow Jesus he would have to do it in his own heart, because none of the churches were traveling in that path or near it.
World's End (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 27