It was hard to gain understanding of a woman through the mind of a youth who didn’t understand her very well himself. But Beauty kept on trying, for love was her field, and her curiosity was inexhaustible. It was hard for her to accept the simple explanation that Marie de Bruyne was virtuous; it was easier for Beauty to believe that every woman had some carefully concealed purpose. Did it please her vanity to keep a handsome and attractive youth dancing attendance? Or was she perhaps trying to control her husband by giving him cause for jealousy? Or could it be that she was an intriguer, and already had another lover? Such surmises the mother kept to herself, but she tried tactfully to convey the fact that women of the world are rarely simple and straightforward; even the best of them have more than one purpose, more than one facet to their characters.
Meanwhile Beauty took her friend Emily Chattersworth into the secret. Emily carried a share of the responsibility, she being the one who had introduced a susceptible youth to this femme fatale. Emily knew Monsieur de Bruyne, having once been the object of his attentions, so she could throw light upon the problem; she described him as a man of sixty or more, sturdily built, decidedly good-looking, and strongly attractive to women. He had, she reported, “a roving eye”: he picked out the best-looking woman in the company and you felt that he was undressing her in his fancy. It was a form of mental disease, and ought to have treatment by a psychiatrist; but it was difficult to suggest that to a gray-haired man of good family and standing. The marriage, Emily said, had been one of those French affairs, arranged by the family; sometimes they turned out well and sometimes badly—but of what marriage system could one say more?
II
There was a day of excitement in the Pomeroy-Nielson family when a letter came from the editor in London saying that he was publishing Rick’s article in his next issue. “It is convincing and informative,” he wrote, “and I believe will make an impression. If you can continue to write on international affairs with such insight, you should be able to make a reputation.”
Rick insisted upon giving Lanny more than half the credit for this happy issue. He did the same for the second article, which he now had ready to post to the editor; that was made out of Compagna Barbara, and the dock-laborer, and others whose minds Lanny had pumped for his friend. Rick had made skillful use of his data, so that you would have thought he had been living for a long time among the laboring masses of Italy, sharing their political secrets. The writer didn’t reveal his own convictions, but left his readers with the idea that statesmen and others in authority had better get food into the country without delay, unless they wished to see what they had already seen in Russia, Hungary, and Bavaria. In due course the editor wrote that he liked this article also. He paid ten pounds for each, and Rick was as proud of these checks as Lanny had been of his first earnings.
This happy outcome gave the American a fresh understanding of the English people and their peculiar ways. It just hadn’t seemed possible to him that an English magazine would publish such an indictment of English policy and procedure. That they paid for it, and held out the promise of a career to the man who wrote it, was something to be graven in one’s memory. You might paint the crimes of the British Empire as black as you pleased, but you would never say anything worse than Britons themselves would never say any-proclaiming in public meetings; and little by little the opinions of that “saving remnant,” the agitation which they maintained, would penetrate the case-hardened minds of elder statesmen, and British policy would be brought into line with the conscience of humanity. Watching Rick’s budding career and helping him in various ways, Lanny once more began to take an interest in world affairs, and to descend more frequently from his ivory tower.
Hot weather came, and Rick and his little family were planning to return to their home. Rick wrote to his editor suggesting that on the way he might take in the conference at Spa, in Belgium, near the German border. The gathering would be of importance, because it represented the beginning of consultation between the Allies and their former foes. The editor agreed to-reserve this topic for Rick, and again Lanny volunteered to act as chauffeur and cicerone. It fitted in very well with certain purposes of his own, he said. They got out their maps and planned a motor-tour, in the course of which Nina and the baby would be delivered to the Channel ferry at Calais, and then Rick would be set down in Spa and introduced to diplomats and journalists. After that Lanny would take the wings of a dove and fly away to be at rest in Seine-et-Oise, a district immediately west of Paris which happily had escaped the ravages of war. He wrote to his lady-love to say that he was going to be in her neighborhood, and would bring in his car some of the art-works concerning which he hoped to have her sage counsel.
III
The little town of Spa is in the Belgian Ardennes, and has mineral springs from which seven centuries of invalids have believed that they derived mysterious benefits. It is a forest and hill resort which has horse-racing and pigeon-shooting, and a casino with plenty of gambling; also a number of hotels suitable for three elderly gentlemen who had constituted themselves the government of Europe. Comfort is important to persons of advancing years, so in the winter season their assemblies would be scheduled for the Riviera, and in the summer’s heat at some agreeable retreat in the north. Hopeful crowds would cheer their progress from one land to another, and a swarm of newspaper men would follow and gather up such crumbs of news as fell from their council tables.
A new stage of world reconstruction was beginning at this ancient center of healing, for here came representatives of the new Socialist government of Germany. It must be admitted that they looked much like the old-time Prussians, and from their buccal cavities emerged the same guttural sounds; but they were speaking for a republic, and declaring their desire to serve the whole German people, not just a military caste. They expected no cordiality, and their expectations were fulfilled; but at least they were not penned up behind barbed wire as the German peace delegation in Paris had been. Liberal-minded persons hoped that by tactful conduct they might succeed in appeasing their former foes and so gradually bring back the days of the “good Europeans.” The meetings of the conference took place in the large white villa which had been the Kaiser’s headquarters during the war.
Lanny and Rick found most of the American reporters whom they had met in San Remo. Several had read Rick’s articles, so he was now a personality, a member of the fraternity. They talked to him freely, because his deadline came so long after theirs. Fessenden and his friends were here, and also there was an English colony and an English club; so Rick’s way was made smooth. He and his friend discovered that the healing springs which bubbled forth from those Belgian hills found no counterpart in the hearts of the conferring diplomats; from them came poisonous fumes of greed and hate and fear. Lanny made this remark, and straightway his friend reached for the wad of copy paper which he kept in his pocket. Lanny in turn made note of the psychology of the professional writer, a man with a split personality; one half of his mind thinks clearly and feels keenly, while the other half keeps watch for “copy.”
The most urgent question which troubled the gathering was the delayed deliveries of coal from the Ruhr. The Germans having wantonly destroyed the French mines, somebody had to go without coal; and was it going to be the innocent French or the guilty Germans? In vain the delegates from the new republic pleaded that if they could not get their factories going they could not meet the reparations demands. The French wanted to start their own industries, so that they could regain their share of world trade, and they were embarrassed by the idea of having German goods coming into France, even though it might be to pay war-debts. There was a peculiar quirk in this situation, which was explained to Rick by an English economist on his country’s staff. Germany couldn’t pay with gold because there wasn’t enough in the world, and she couldn’t pay with goods without ruining French industry and throwing French workers onto the scrap-heap. Yet the political lives of both French and British statesmen rested upon t
heir willingness to go on repeating day and night: “The Germans shall pay to the last sou!”—or “to the last farthing!” as the case might be.
Rick, in his capacity of “liberal,” wanted to hear what the Germans had to say; and this was not difficult, as there was a large delegation on hand, all eager to talk to journalists. A large and florid member of the Berlin city council talked vehemently to the two young men about the effects of the starvation blockade, but unfortunately he was not a convincing illustration of his own argument. The main grievance was that the Allies could not be persuaded to fix the amount of the indemnities, and thus the Germans could not know where they stood in any business affairs. Rick was prepared to concede that, but the official answerer of questions went on to contend that the treaty of Versailles was so bad that it justified the Germans in refusing to comply with any of the terms that did not seem fair to them. The young Englishman’s patience gave out, and he asked: “What do you want the Allies to do—fight the war over again?” It seemed to Lanny that the method of “conference” didn’t always work as the liberals expected!
IV
Another subject which was causing embittered controversy was the failure of the Germans to surrender war materials to the Allies as the treaty had provided. Concerning this there could be no argument—at least from the Allies’ point of view. Unless the war was to be fought over again, for what did Germany need heavy guns and bombing planes? In vain would suave confidential agents whisper into the ears of Allied staff members that German armies might be needed to put down the subhuman Bolshevist conspiracy that was establishing itself in eastern Europe. The French wanted this done, but by their own allies, the Poles and other border peoples; they wouldn’t let any Russian territories be occupied by Germans—their cordon sanitaire was double-fronted, to keep Germans from going east as well as to keep Russians from coming west.
Lanny and Rick got an inside view of this special problem of German disarmament when they ran into a British officer that Captain Finchley who had been Rick’s superior in training-camp, and whom Lanny had met at the War Planes Review on Salisbury Plain a few days before the outbreak of war. He was glad to see them both, and interested to talk about the strange duty which had been his for the past year and a half—going into a hostile land to supervise the exportation of surrendered implements of slaughter. Captain Finchley was here to report to the Allied staffs concerning the progress of his labors; to tell them, among other things, that he had counted four hundred and seventy-three million cartridges and thirty-eight million seven hundred and fifty thousand shrapnel shells!
Such astronomical figures gave Lanny a depressing sense of the hopelessness of his father’s future as a salesman of arms in Europe. How long would it take to shoot off that much ammunition? he asked, and the captain, who had had dealings with Robbie Budd and knew him well, replied cheerfully: “Don’t worry! They’ll be used in the end. They’re for sale cheap, and some poor blighters will kill some other poor blighters with them.”
“Who, for example?” inquired the youth.
“Chinese war lords are buying them to fight their rivals. South American revolutionists are using them against their governments. Traders are smuggling them in to the Bolsheviks, while the French are supplying them to the Poles to fight the Bolsheviks. The French are selling them to the Turks to fight us with, and I suppose our traders are selling them to the Arabs to fight the French with.”
It all sounded rather shocking, but you couldn’t blame a British army officer. He had his hands full unearthing secret hiding-places of the wily Germans and forcing them to load their own weapons into freight-cars; it was no good expecting him to travel over the earth and follow those arms to their final destinations. The British Empire was run under an ancient and honorable system known as “free trade,” and anybody who had money had the right to buy arms and load them onto a ship and disappear from the ken of governments.
V
After several days of research Rick said: “I’m all right now, Lanny; and I can see that you are ‘r’arin’ to go.’” One read American slang in the movie “subtitles,” and one adopted it.
“But how will you manage to get about, Rick?”
“I’ll take a fiacre if it’s far. I’ll work it out.”
So Lanny put his bags into his car and set out for Paris. The route took him through the very heart of the war zone, about which he had been reading and hearing countless times; but nothing could equal the actual sight—and the smell, which now, twenty months after the Armistice, still hung over those regions of horror. Forests were represented by a few shattered treetrunks thrusting to the sky, often with a raven or a buzzard on top. Villages once populous were represented by a smoke-blackened wall with a gaping hole that had been a window. Trenches were slowly collapsing, and with them the empty tins and the rags and bones that had once been soldiers wearing uniforms and eating meals. Shell craters still made one think of a land that had had smallpox; also, it seemed now to have vermin in the shape of parties of tourists parked by the roadside and poking among the ruins.
One crossed the vast series of trenches and entanglements which had been the Hindenburg line, and from there on the signs of damage grew fewer, the work of repair less hopeless. So he came to the Château Les Forêts, the summer home of Emily Chattersworth, where the “Huns” had had only a few days, and American money had put great numbers of men to work removing the evidence of their ravages. The dead bodies of a German division had been buried in the beech forests which Lanny had explored as a lad, and patient care was restoring the beautiful green lawns on which he had listened to Anatole France relating the sins of old-time kings and queens.
He spent the night here, and, sitting in the spacious drawing-room from which the valuable paintings and tapestries had been stolen, his good friend revealed to him that she was a sharer in the secret of this motor-tour. She was a wise woman, and in the course of more than twenty years had learned a lot about the ways of Europe; she told Lanny about Frenchwomen, the intense passions which animate them and the rigid conventions which bind them. Do not expect them to depart too far from those conventions and retain any happiness, for we are what social forces have made us, and we are not able to shed our skins like snakes and lizards. Garde à vous. Lanny Budd!—for when you venture into a woman’s heart you are taking a long journey, and if you think you can retrace your steps, you may find that thorny barricades have sprung up behind you.
However, the experienced Mrs. Emily did not try to dissuade him from his enterprise. She understood his liking for older women, and it was not to be supposed that he would lead a celibate life on the Riviera, or anywhere else on the continent of Europe, unless he was in a monastery with heavy stone walls and iron gates. She told him what she knew about the woman of his choice, and about the man who was to become his associate in la vie à trois. Denis de Bruyne, owner of a large fleet of taxicabs and other business enterprises, would probably accept the situation when he learned about it, but that was a matter concerning which you could never be sure. The male animal under the influence of sexual jealousy is dangerous and unpredictable, whether he be the laboring brute in the slums or the master of money accustomed to commanding what he wants. Emily Chattersworth, who had lived among the masters in Newport and New York as well as in Paris and on the Coast of Pleasure, could tell strange tales of things she had seen and heard; she told them to her young friend, not sparing him, because he was stepping out on an unchartered path, and treasons, stratagems, and spoils might be his portion from the next day on.
VI
Lanny Budd was motoring on one of the smooth straight highways of France, in the pleasant mildness of a July morning, with a light haze tempering the glare of the sun and lending the landscape shades of pastel. Making a circle to the north of Paris to avoid the traffic, he was presently in the Seine-et-Oise country, a kind of rarefied suburb of a great city, with small fruit and vegetable farms mixed with villas and country residences of the well-to-do and
medium classes. A gentle, pleasant land, which had known peace for generations; a land in which the old and the new are oddly mixed—an old church with dwellings huddled against it, as if seeking protection from a modern motor-road which has cut off one corner; a land of comfort and leisure, where even the rivers have time to meander, to make playful eddies and ripples as they slide past gardens with willow trees bending down to the water, and villas and summer cottages with tiny landing-piers for rowboats, and here and there a man or a boy sitting with a fishing-pole. A tantalizing dream haunts the souls of men and boys in rural France, and apparently they never lose it, but will sit for hours in a gentle glow of expectancy; if once the dream should happen to come true, they would rush home in excitement and mark a red circle around the date on a calendar: Un poisson!
Lanny had a different kind of hope, no less important to him. His heart was high, and each feature of the ever-varying landscape would suggest lines out of the poetry books he had learned pretty nearly by heart. Each stream might flow past her door, each villa might resemble hers, each walled garden—surely she would have a walled garden, with old pear and apricot trees trained against it, their fruits in the hot sunshine performing their quiet miracle. Now she would be walking in the garden, waiting for his call; his thoughts reached out to her in happy songs. There had fallen a splendid tear from the passion-flower at the gate; she was coming, his dove, his dear; she was coming, his life, his fate!
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 12