Seven-year-old Frances Barnes Budd was a happy child, and healthy like her two parents. She had dark brown eyes and a wealth of dark brown hair like her mother; a vigorous and active body, eager for every sort of play, but not much impulse toward the life of the mind—again like her mother. She adored her father, who came to her like a prince out of a fairy story, always with adventures to tell, and music and dancing and games. She had been guarded from every evil thought, including that of trouble between her parents, or that there was anything unusual about having two fathers.
She was the incarnation of six years of marriage, with their joys and sorrows. Lanny could put all these out of his thoughts when he was out in the busy world, but when he came here he saw them before his eyes. Being of an imaginative temperament, he would fall to thinking: “Could I have saved that marriage? And should I?” Six years of shared experience are not to be wiped out of the soul, which has depths beyond the reach of any eraser. He would wonder: “Could I have been a little more patient, more tolerant? Could I have made more allowances for her youth, and for the environment which made her different from me?” He would wonder: “Is she thinking such thoughts now? Is she remembering our old happiness?” He would never ask such questions, of course, for that would be a breach of good form, a trespassing upon her new life.
He had not come to visit Irma, but Frances. He would play with the child, devote himself to her—but how could he help seeing the mother in the child? He would start thinking his “Pink” thoughts about their offspring. Poor little rich girl! Some day she would awaken to the fact that she was set apart from other children, and that what was supposed to be a great good fortune was in fact an abnormality and a burden. She would discover that friends could be mercenary and designing, and that love was not always what it pretended to be. She would discover the secret war in the hearts of her mother and father, and that this war extended over the whole earth and divided all human society, a chasm deeper than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, or those which lie at the bottom of the ocean floor. Frances’ mother was content to live on her own side of that social chasm, while Frances’ father insisted upon crossing from one side to the other and back again—a most unstable and nerve-trying sort of life. But he must never let the child know about it—for that would be unsettling her mind, that would be propagandizing!
III
In the evening Lanny would be invited over to the house which for a year or two had been his home and Irma’s. Perhaps it would have been tactful for him not to come, but he had his secret purposes in coming. He had known Ceddy since boyhood, and Ceddy’s friend and colleague in the Foreign Office, Gerald Albany, who lived near by. They knew that Lanny had been tinged with Pinkness, and they were used to that in their own ranks; they took it for granted that as men acquire experience, they learn how hard it is to change the nature of men and nations. When Lanny said that he had decided to leave politics to the experts, they took that to mean themselves, and the arrangement was satisfactory.
So they talked freely about the problems facing the British Empire. They had a “line,” which Lanny understood perfectly: British governments change, but foreign policy never, and that was why Britannia had ruled the waves over a period of four centuries. If in the course of the conversation the American guest put in the suggestion that it might now be necessary for the old lady to give some thought to the air above the waves, that was taken good-naturedly; it was well known that Lanny’s father had airplanes to sell, and one might reasonably assume that the son had an interest in the business. Commercial men weren’t looked down upon as they had been in old England; for, after all, this was an industrial age, and business and politics were pretty thoroughly mixed. The recent Prime Minister, Mr. Stanley Baldwin, had been an ironmaster, and the present Prime Minister, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, was an arms manufacturer from Birmingham.
There existed at this time a peculiar situation in the inner shrine of the British government. Intelligence Service, most secret of all organizations, was turning in one report after another showing that the German Air Force had outstripped the British; also, that the German Navy was disregarding its pledged word to limit construction to one-third of the British. Prime Minister Chamberlain, who believed in business and called it peace, was solving the problem by sticking the reports away and forgetting them. But Anthony Eden, Foreign Minister, was on the warpath against this course, and Sir Robert Vansittart, the highest permanent official of the Foreign Office, was backing him up.
Gerald Albany, the embodiment of propriety, would probably not have mentioned this delicate subject in the presence of an American; but Lanny let it be known that he had heard about it. So then they talked. Ceddy declared that the trouble was due to the inability of some statesmen to face frankly the fact that Hitler had made Germany into a great power, and that she was again entitled to cast her full vote in the councils of Europe. Irma supported him, speaking with that new assurance which had come with her title. It was her idea that her new country should make a gentleman’s agreement with Hitler covering all the problems of Europe, and should use this as a lever to force France into breaking off the Russian alliance. Thus, and only thus, could there again be security for property and religion. Lanny, listening to her emphatic phrases, thought: “She is still quarreling with me in her heart!”
IV
The basic principle of British policy for a couple of centuries had been to maintain a balance of power on the Continent, and to fight whatever nation attempted to gain dominance there. Before the World War that power had been Germany. After that war, it had been France, which had accumulated a huge gold reserve and used it to build up a “Little Entente” in Central Europe and to demand a share of the oil of the Near East. Thus it had become necessary for the British to lend money to Germany and build it up as a counterweight. Now there were many in Britain who thought the counterweight was growing dangerously heavy, and that France should again receive the support for which she was clamoring, and for which Léon Blum had come a year ago to beg in vain.
The problem was complicated by the upsurgence of Russia, which most British statesmen had written off as a derelict after 1917. Russia now had an alliance with France, but didn’t know whether to trust it or not, and the British didn’t know whether the French meant it, and whether they should be encouraged to mean it or to sabotage it. French policy, unlike the British, did change with the government, and that was a bad thing for the French, and for their friends and backers. Many persons in Britain took the position that the question of Russia was not merely a political issue, but a moral one; they refused to “shake hands with murder.” Gerald Albany, a clergyman’s son, was among these; but Ceddy spoke cautiously, saying that in statecraft it was not always possible to be guided by one’s moral and religious ideas. “We should have had a bad time at the outbreak of the last war if we hadn’t had the aid of Russia; and surely the hands of the Tsar had bloodstains enough.”
The fourteenth Earl of Wickthorpe was about Lanny’s age, and everyone agreed that he had a brilliant career before him. He was tall and fair, with delightful pink cheeks and a little blond mustache of which he took care. He was quiet and serious, a good listener and slow speaker. He considered himself modern and democratic, meaning that in his own set he did not exact any tribute to his rank. In his dealings with those below him it had never occurred to him to do anything but to say what he wanted in the fewest words and to be at once obeyed.
He had known Lanny well, and had excused Lanny’s free and easy ways on the ground that Americans were like that. When he had met Lanny’s wife, at one of the international congresses, he had the thought that she had made a poor match, and it was a pity. He wondered if she had realized it, and before long he decided that she had. He had known about the American practice of easy divorce, but the idea had been repugnant to him, and he had been rigidly correct in his attitude to his friend’s wife all through the period when they had rented the Lodge and had the run of the castle.
Only when he heard the news that Irma was in Reno getting a divorce had he allowed himself to think about her seriously. Evidently she liked him, and evidently liked the thought of being a countess. He wasn’t pleased by the idea of having a second-hand wife or of being a stepfather; but, on the other hand, he was pleased by the idea of getting out of debt and being able to preserve his great estate in spite of outrageously high taxes. He had contrived to be sent to “the States” on a diplomatic errand, and had invited the blooming grass widow to become his bride with the same grave courtesy as if it had been a proposal to lead the grand march in a ballroom. She had been very generous; the trustees of her estate had sat down with his lordship’s solicitor and inquired what settlement was desired, and had agreed to everything with no more than a casual reading of the somewhat elaborate document.
V
There were not many guests at week-ends, because of the lack of room in the Lodge; but friends dropped in in the evening and there was talk about the problems of the world. Just now it was Spain, which resembled a bunch of firecrackers going off in the vicinity of a powder-keg; no one could tell which way the sparks were going to fly and when all Europe might blow up. A publisher of newspapers, a little man who himself resembled a bunch of firecrackers going off, urged Wickthorpe to talk to friends in the Cabinet and bring about the recognition of General Franco as a belligerent without further delay. Lanny, who had been informing President Roosevelt that the British and French governments were conniving at the destruction of the Spanish people’s government, now heard this powerful British publisher maintain that the British and French governments were favoring the Spanish Red government so outrageously that it amounted to driving Italy and Germany to war against them. “It will come, and we shall be to blame for it,” declared Lord Beaverbrook, who had once been plain Max Aitken, company promoter of Canada. He had made a million pounds there, and now he owned The Daily Express and the Evening Standard, and from his state of mind you would have thought that the Bolsheviks were in the act of laying siege to these valuable properties.
Nearly a year ago the various governments had formed what was called a “Non-Intervention Committee”; it was meeting in London and had held something like seventy sessions, every one of them an acrimonious wrangle. The Italians and the Germans, who had intervened in Spain from the first hour, meant to go on intervening, while steadily denying that they had ever thought of such a nefarious action. Lanny had heard a story of a Kentucky Colonel who knocked a man down, and when asked: “Did he call you a liar?” replied: “Worse than that; he proved it.” That was the situation before this Committee, which refused to receive complaints from individuals, but couldn’t prevent representatives of the Soviet government from proving that the Italians and the Germans were systematically sending in troops and matériel to General Franco. Then the Italian and German delegates would fly into a fury and fight their share of the war in London.
A German cruiser off the coast of North Africa had been attacked by what Berlin called “Spanish-Bolshevist submarines.” Berlin now demanded that Britain and France take part in a naval demonstration off Valencia. France, patrolling the French frontier with Spain, demanded that Portugal should patrol its frontiers, through which Italy and Germany were pouring in supplies; when Portugal refused, France withdrew her patrol officers and left her highways open into Spain. That was the way it went; one crisis after another, and no way to stop them. It was obvious to insiders of every nation that Franco alone could not conquer his people; if “Non-Intervention” were actually enforced, the Fascists would be licked. Italy and Germany were determined that this should not happen. At any and all costs, their man was going to win.
What did the British want? They had great difficulty in making up their minds; all choices were painful. Obviously they couldn’t permit the Reds to build themselves a fortress on the Atlantic seaboard, enclosing all Europe in two prongs of a pincers. The British owned immensely valuable properties in Spain—Rio Tinto copper, for example, indispensable in making munitions—and certainly they didn’t want strikes and Red commissars in those mines. On the other hand it might be fatal in wartime to have German submarines based on the Atlantic, and France enclosed in a pair of Nazi pincers. On the whole it seemed best to let the two sides fight it out and exhaust each other, and then a compromise government could be set up, the sort the British could lend money to. The only trouble was, neither side was willing to admit that it was exhausted; this was a war to the death, a kind which is bad for trade and every sort of vested interest.
In Downing Street there had been one crisis after another, and people’s tempers were beginning to be frayed. Even in the most exclusive drawing-rooms, among English ladies and gentlemen, there were exhibitions of bad manners. Among the guests at Wickthorpe Lodge was an author of novels very popular in smart London circles; he had airy manners and was a great ladies’ man, in spite of the fact that he was growing bald. In his thinking he was for practical purposes a Fascist, and did not resent the label. Lanny had met him here and there at parties, and knew that he was a confidant of Lanny’s Fascist brother-in-law, Vittorio di San Girolamo. When Gerald Albany remarked that the trouble was that nobody could depend upon the word of Mussolini, he was “such a gutter-rat,” this novelist blew up. “My God, man, what sort of world do you think you’re living in? Do you imagine you can handle those Italian Reds like members of your Sunday-school class? They are bomb-throwing, knife-sticking anarchists, and before Mussolini put them down they had seized half the factories in Italy. Do you imagine you know how to deal with people of that kidney? And when you have to find men to do the same job in England, do you imagine they’ll be polite church members like yourself?”
“I’m not telling Mussolini how to govern Italy,” replied the Foreign Office man mildly. “But when he asks for the right to blockade Spanish ports and keep British ships out of them, I naturally have to consider what he offers in return, and whether I can believe what he tells me.”
“All I can say is,” retorted the novelist, “when there’s a killer in your house and you call for the police, you expect them to shoot first and present their character certificates afterward.”
VI
Lanny Budd would listen and say little; only now and then a well-chosen question, to steer the conversation if it could be done. He fixed in his memory details which might be of importance; the character of statesmen and their secret purposes, the attitude of great industrialists, the state of popular movements, the military preparations of this country and that. Alone in his room, he would type out the data and address them to Gus Gennerich, not putting the letter in with other mail that went out from the castle, but saving it to be posted in a public box.
Having done this, he would have moods of satisfaction, followed by others of depression. He had fallen for the Roosevelt charm, but the spell did not last all the time. Professor Alston had warned him that F.D.R. was of an “impressionable” temperament. He had been full of sympathy for Spain while listening to Lanny’s story, but could it be that next day he had received a visit from someone high up in the hierarchy of the Holy Church and had heard stories about nuns being sprinkled with oil and burned by Spanish Reds? And would he believe these stories—or at any rate let the prelate depart in the belief that he believed them?
Anyhow, even with the best of intentions, could he absorb all the facts which came to him? What a brain would have to be in that large head to classify and retain them all! The President of the United States must have hundreds of people working for him and bringing him information; thousands must be sending it on their own impulse. Where did it all go? Who read it and heeded it? Lanny saw a vision of his reports being handed in by Gus and added to the pile on the desk. Something else would cover them up in a few minutes, and would they ever be uncovered again? Lanny would have to go back and find out if F.D.R. had ever heard of them, or if they had been lost in the files! And suppose the great man happened to be too busy to see him—what then woul
d become of an art expert’s bright dream of changing world history?
“Put not your trust in princes,” the psalmist had advised, and Lanny was not heeding the warning. In those old days princes had had to take measures to keep other princes from poisoning them; the surest way was to poison the other princes first. Nowadays princes had to think about raising campaign funds and getting re-elected, keeping control over Congress in the off years, and matters such as that. They wanted to make the world safe for democracy, and at the same time to keep the country out of war. When they discovered that these aims were incompatible, they were in a predicament, and what wonder if their words one day contradicted the words of the previous day, and if their actions were not always in accordance with the campaign platforms of their party?
This much Lanny had already learned: that the favor of princes is a very tempting thing. For princes can act, whereas art experts can do nothing except talk in drawing-rooms. One gets so tired of futility, and of seeing things going the wrong way. If only somebody who could do something would do it! That had been Lanny’s thought for more than half his life, ever since he had seen a world war burst upon a horrified humanity. Now he saw another getting ready to burst; black thunderclouds on the horizon, rolling rapidly upward, shutting out the sunlight; and people going about, heedless, as if in a dream; as if they were blind and couldn’t see the darkness, deaf and couldn’t hear the rumble of the thunder—those guns and bombs in Spain, to abandon the simile and deal with plain facts. The grandson of Budd’s had been close enough to the first World War to have shell splinters fall near, and the son of Budd-Erling had already been close enough to the second to see houses destroyed by shellfire and hear bullets whining past his ears. How could he help being nervous about the prospects?
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