Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  “One thing I want you to have in mind, darling—and never forget it. The time will come when you will want to marry, and it would be wicked for you not to marry—some woman who can give you children, and be in your life to its end. I want you to know that when the time comes, I will step out of your way.”

  “Forget it, dear!” he commanded. “My bump of philoprogenitiveness seems to be poorly developed.” He didn’t know the French for this long word, but said it in English, and added: “You may be astonished once more by the extent of my learning, so let me explain. In that wonderful library accumulated by my great-great-uncle I stumbled upon a work on the science of phrenology, containing a chart of all the bumps on the human skull. I examined my own with great interest, and was pained to discover that I have flat surfaces and even hollows at those places where the most desirable qualities are to be found.”

  “I shall never give any credence to that so-called science,” declared Marie de Bruyne, with emphasis.

  7

  Sweet, Sweet, O Pan!

  I

  Safe at home in his ivory tower, Lanny waited, and in due course the promised letter arrived:

  Chéri:

  I have had the talk with my friend as planned, and I am happy to report that all is well. It is a strange story, which I shall have the pleasure of telling you some day. As you know, I have been bitter, and have kept my feelings locked in my heart. This, it seems, has not been without effect upon my friend. He has been remorseful, and was deeply affected by the news I brought him. It was a strange and touching scene. There are worlds within worlds inside the human heart, and one could spend a lifetime studying a single one. May I live to have that pleasure! Suffice it to say now that the future gives us no occasion for anxiety. My friend concedes my right to be happy. I concede his, but doubt if that will help him. This is a story of only indirect interest to you, so I will not go into details. Everything is as you would wish it to be, and the schedule agreed upon will be followed.

  Your devoted Marie.

  Lanny read this letter many times and studied its phrases. It told him what he needed to know, but with much reserve, and he saw that caution was deeply rooted in her nature. Was she afraid that her letters might be opened by some other person? He had told her of his frank talks with his mother; but all the same Marie would keep their love as something for the privacy of their chamber, and would never spread it on paper. Leave that for the poets and writers of romance!

  He told Beauty the events of their honeymoon, and answered her long string of questions. She had something to do with their future happiness, and Lanny was determined to have a clear understanding with her. Marie de Bruyne was his choice, and was worthy of all honor; she was going to be received precisely as if there had been that fashionable wedding with flower-laden bridesmaids. What he said was: “I ask you to treat her as I treated Marcel.” A difficult stroke to parry! The mother could only answer, feebly: “If she is as good to you as Marcel was to me, Lanny.”

  “I let you be the judge in the case of Marcel, and now it is my turn to be the judge. So long as she makes me happy, my mother has to be grateful to her and receive her as a daughter.”

  “Or as a sister, Lanny?” Beauty couldn’t resist the temptation. Claws have been given to cats for use, and they retract them only with reluctance. Lanny decided right then that the main headquarters of his romance had best be located in the home of the Sorbonne professor’s widow.

  With Marie’s permission he went over to call on the old lady, who occupied her cottage the year round, as persons in modest circumstances have to do. Lanny sat down with her and told the story of his heart; he made love to Marie in absentia, by proxy, and the desert sprang into bloom, the birds sang in the garden of an elderly widow’s heart. Madame Scelles was a most respectable old lady, but she was a French old lady and knew the customs of her country; she agreed that she would chaperon this romance and adopt Lanny as her son.

  Also the dutiful youth wrote to his father in Connecticut. He named no names, but revealed that he had fallen in love with an unhappily married French lady, and had just had a delightful motor-trip with her. Knowing his father, Lanny added that his innamorata enjoyed his piano playing, and that they read classic French literature together; she wore few jewels, and those few were family heirlooms; her idea of an acceptable gift was one of Great-Great-Uncle Eli’s books. A cautious father might rest secure in the knowledge that his son had found for the gravest of a young man’s problems a solution which would not involve him in any scandals, extravagances, or dissipations. “But tear up this letter and don’t tell anybody in Newcastle!”

  II

  Strange as it might have seemed to an outsider, Kurt Meissner also appeared to have found a solution of his sexproblem. He stayed right there inside the walls of Bienvenu, rarely going out except for a long walk. Whatever discontent he may have felt he sublimated and poured into his compositions. The world outside might be a madhouse, beyond any man’s power to control, but a piece of unfrozen architecture could be reshaped until one had got it right; that was art, and it was also science. If the world didn’t like it, so much the worse for the world.

  Beauty was not a little in awe of this tall erect young soldier with the smooth straw-colored hair and the pale blue eyes that could so easily turn to steel. Lanny watched their relationship and was amused by the developments. Beauty would take things from Kurt that she had never taken from any other man. The gay daughter of pleasure who had been willing to stake her whole future upon a whim had quarreled often with Marcel over his efforts to keep her from playing poker all night; but no one ever heard anything like that now. Kurt would make it plain that he expected Beauty’s company at night, and he had it. Kurt would look at her across the breakfast table and say, quietly: “I thought you said you weren’t going to have any more cream with your fruit.” And Beauty would eat plain fruit. Kurt would say: “Do you really need to keep up with the fashions while half the children in Europe are crying with hunger?” So Beauty would wear a last season’s costume, and send a check to the American relief, which now was helping to feed the children of Germany.

  The pair had been living together for more than a year, and the first year is the hardest for the ill-assorted, who have much adjusting to do. Lanny, always curious about love, learned many things that might be useful to him in his own affaire. His mother was much enamored, and also had been cowed by grief and fear. She was almost forty, which is known as “the dangerous age.” It is supposed to be a woman’s last chance; if she doesn’t get a man then and manage to hold him, she will have a lonely old age. Beauty was trying her best to hold Kurt; she would hide her weaknesses, she would starve her vanities in the effort to keep his respect. Both the men of her household were leagued against the poor soul; for Lanny told her that Kurt was a great man and had more brains than she would ever be able to share.

  The result was to cut her off more and more from what is called “social life.” If she could have worn Kurt as a decoration, a shining jewel in a tiara, she would have had a grand time in Cannes and Nice and Paris; she would have intrigued to have her protégé invited into the most elegant homes, and would have lured the musical elite to hear him perform his compositions. But Kurt had to be hidden; he had to be Lanny’s music-teacher—and how could one confer distinction upon a hired person? So Beauty stayed at home, wore the dresses that Kurt considered becoming, and instead of repeating the chatter of the fashionable she listened while Kurt and Lanny discussed the Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn.

  Kurt had become devoted to Baby Marceline, who no longer stumbled and groped, but danced to music with spontaneous grace; she no longer stammered a few childish words, but prattled all day, and was a little fairy in the household. Her mother’s one idea of bringing up a child was to give it everything it asked for; and here again she ran head on into German ideas of Zucht. Beauty would say no, and the little one would start to wheedle, and Beauty would be on the point of giving way, when
Kurt would remark: “You said no,” and Beauty would decide that she had meant no. Nor did she dare to cheat and give way in secret, for when Kurt found that out, he became very angry. There could, he said, be nothing worse for a child than to discover a division in a household; to be able to play one of its elders against another, and to get its way by intrigue. Kurt called Lanny into conference, and of course Lanny agreed with him, as he always did. So Beauty had to give up the pleasure of spoiling her darling, and these two aggressive young males assumed still further command of the ménage.

  III

  A good part of Lanny’s allowance was going for music scores new and old. He always pretended that he wanted them for himself; he and Kurt would practice them, Kurt using any one of his various instruments. Lanny had read somewhere that Liszt had performed the prodigious feat of taking a new opera score and rendering it so far as possible on the piano at first sight; to a star such as that Lanny had hitched his wagon. But just as in his father’s business there was a race between the makers of armorplate and the makers of guns, so in the music world there appeared to be a race between performers and composers; as fast as the former have achieved some prodigy of technique, the latter proceed to set a new standard of digital agility.

  Lanny didn’t have to buy books, for there was that library, and Kurt stuck to the conviction that old books are the best. Kurt discovered America in an odd way, through the literature of New England transcendentalism. It was, he said, a pale copy of German philosophical idealism, but it was interesting to see a provincial people groping their way in a field of speculative thought and coloring it with their peculiar pioneer qualities. Kurt said that Americans pursued metaphysical activities in the same way that they hunted wild Indians in their forests, each man picking out his own tree or rock and aiming his own gun. Said Lanny: “I suppose the German philosophers march in well-ordered ranks, thinking in unison and armed with government subsidies.” Kurt laughed, but all the same he thought that was the way to set about any undertaking, military or metaphysical.

  Kurt read Herndon’s life of Abraham Lincoln, and was greatly impressed by the spectacle of a railsplitter out of a pioneer cabin rising to become the leader of a nation in a crisis. But he was repelled by the details of democratic political manipulation, the things a man had to do in order to become “the people’s choice” in a land which had no traditions and no discipline as Kurt understood them. “Such a career would be inconceivable anywhere in Europe,” he declared.

  “Are you sure?” Lanny asked. “Aren’t you forgetting that you have a saddlemaker running your own country now?”

  It had never occurred to the fastidious German aesthete to think of Fritz Ebert in that way; he had seen only the seamy side of German Social-Democracy and his prejudices against it were intense. But he had to admit that the movement had saved Germany from Bolshevism in the course of the past few months, and from his point of view that was a most important service. Also Kurt had been impressed by Rick’s statement that the program of British labor was the most constructive now before the country. In these desperate times one had to be prepared to revise one’s thinking, and Kurt was reading English magazines which were full of strange and disturbing ideas.

  He received letters from his family that would leave him in a state of depression for days. The situation in Germany was appalling; there appeared to be an almost complete absence of necessities, and no way to get industry or trade started. The government could exist only by printing paper money, and as a result retail prices were six or eight times what they had been before the war. In Stubendorf it wasn’t so bad, because this was an agricultural district, and crops were in the ground, and some harvested; so the Meissners had food. But the workers in the towns were starving, and there was chaos in most of Upper Silesia, which didn’t know whether it was Polish or German, so people who should have been at work were arguing and fighting over the forthcoming plebiscite. There were “polling police,” half German and half Polish, supposed to be keeping order, but much of the time they were fighting among themselves. There was that terrible Korfanty, half patriot and half gangster, who was inciting the Poles; in August he tried to seize the whole of Upper Silesia by force, and there was a state of disorder for several weeks. To Herr Meissner, comptroller-general of Schloss Stubendorf, order was the breath of life, and to Herr Meissner’s son it was gall in the mouth to read of indignities which his father and family were suffering at the hands of a people whom they regarded as sub-human.

  IV

  One morning Lanny was called from his music practice to the telephone, and heard a man’s voice, speaking English with a foreign accent. “Do you know me this time?” This time Lanny did, and cried: “Mr. Robin! Where are you?”

  “At the station in Cannes. I have been to Milan on business and am on my way to Paris. I promised the boys I would not pass by without seeing you, if you would permit.”

  “Of course I will! Shall I drive over for you?”

  “I will be taking a taxi.”

  “Be prepared to stay for lunch and tell me all the news.”

  Lanny went to his mother; she had never met Johannes Robin, but understood that he was in various business deals with Robbie Budd, and she took it as a law of nature that Robbie’s friends had to be entertained. Lanny had told Kurt about the Jewish salesman of electrical gadgets who had served all through the war as a channel for Lanny’s letters to Kurt, receiving them in Holland and remailing them into Germany. Kurt knew how the small Lanny Budd had picked up Robin on a train, and how the man had since become very rich by selling magnetos and other war materials to Germany. Kurt said he had no prejudice against Jews when they were great moral philosophers like Spinoza or joyous musicians like Mendelssohn, but he didn’t care for those who coined money out of the needs of his people. However, it was necessary to take the visitor into the secret of Kurt’s identity, for of course he would remember the name, and could hardly fail to penetrate the disguise of a Swiss music-teacher.

  When the taxi arrived at the gate, Lanny was waiting to greet his guest. The dark-eyed and handsome Jewish gentleman became more expansive and self-assured with every year, but he would never fail to be humble with the Budd family, eager for their approval and grateful when he got it. Lanny explained how he was giving shelter to his old German friend, whose home had been turned over to the enemy and whose family had been all but ruined. Mr. Robin replied that both as a businessman and as a Jew he was without national prejudices; many of his best friends were Germans. Also he was a lover of the arts, and would be proud to meet a composer who, he felt certain, was destined to a great future. “Tell him that!” said Lanny, with a smile.

  They sat down to a lunch upon which Leese had expended her talents, and the guest started in right away to say what happiness his elder son had derived from a short violin composition of Kurt’s which Lanny had taken the trouble to copy out and send to Rotterdam. Hansi had played it at a recital at the conservatory, where many had inquired concerning its author. Then Kurt knew that he was dealing with no ordinary money-grubber, and he listened while Mr. Robin told about his wonderful first-born, who was now sixteen, and possessed such fire and temperament that he was able to draw out of pieces of dead wood and strips of pig’s intestines the intensest expressions of the soul of man.

  That darling Hansi, about whom Lanny had been hearing for seven years, had grown tall but very thin, because he worked so hard that it was difficult to bring him to meals; he had large soulful eyes and wavy black hair, in short, the very picture of an inspired young musician. “Oh, M. Dalcroze”—so Kurt was addressed in the household—“I wish that you might hear him and play with him! And you, Lanny—he talks about nothing so often as when shall he meet Lanny Budd, and do I think that Lanny Budd will like him, even though he is Jewish and so many people have prejudices against his race.”

  “Listen, Mr. Robin,” the long-talked-of Lanny Budd remarked, on the impulse of the moment, “why don’t you let those two boys come to s
ee us?”

  “Oh, but I would be delighted!” replied the father.

  “What are they doing now?”

  “Now they are in the country, where we have a lovely place. But Hansi will practice every day. In September they go back to school.”

  “In September I have an engagement too,” said Lanny. “But why not let them come now and spend a week or two with us?”

  “Would you really like to have them?” The Jewish gentleman looked from Lanny to Lanny’s mother, and each could see the gratification in his dark eyes.

  “I am sure it would give us all great pleasure,” said Beauty, to whom “company” was as a summer shower to a thirsty garden.

  “We have a lot of violin music that we should like to know better,” put in Kurt. “I make a stab at it, but it is not like really hearing it.”

  “If I would telegraph to them, they would be starting tomorrow.”

  “The sooner the better,” said Lanny. “Tell them to fly.”

  The father turned pale at the thought. “Never would I take such a chance with the two most precious of beings to me! I cannot tell you, Madame Budd, what those two lads mean to me and my wife. For whatever I do in this world I make the excuse that Hansi and Freddi will make it worth while that I have lived.” Beauty smiled gently and told him that she knew the feeling well. He was a very nice man, she decided, in spite of that one trouble for which he couldn’t be blamed.

  V

  Kurt went back to his work, and Lanny took the visitor to his studio for a quiet talk. Now and then Robbie had mentioned in his letters how well Johannes was doing, and Lanny was always proud of this, because the Jewish partner was his discovery: The firm of Robbie and Robin was engaged in a series of complicated transactions, for which the New England aristocrat put up the money and the refugee from a ghetto in Russian Poland furnished the judgment and hard work, They were an active pair of traders, and nothing gave Johannes more pleasure than to talk about their successes.