The arrangements amounted to a conspiracy against that son of the people, that orator with the silver tongue, the ragged black mustache, and the roomy paunch, Aristide Briand. They were going to surround him, flatter him, play upon his humanitarian sentiments, and persuade him to agree to a temporary moratorium, and not send his armies into the bankrupt German republic. The climax of their scheming was revealed by Emily Chattersworth with delighted chuckles; they were going to lure a French Premier into playing a game of golf with a British Prime Minister! That is the way they keep the political peace in the green and pleasant land across the Channel; the orators tear into one another across the long table which separates the rival front benches, and then they go off and play a foursome together, and afterward have a drink, and thus compromises are arranged and civil wars averted.
After his oratorical effort the German Minister of Reconstruction was in need of respite; and two of his aides put him into a car and drove him to a place where he might have his tired brow smoothed, metaphorically speaking, by an experienced smoother. He came to Bienvenu, where he met a charming hostess and her intelligent and sympathetic son, also a young German musician who had been twice wounded in the war, and was thus in position to put a seal of security upon these Americans and their menage. Nobody else to bother a visitor, no stupid attempt to make a lion out of him and show him off to idle chatterers. If only all traveling diplomats, authors, lecturers, and other easily bored persons could find a place of refuge like that in every town!
The minister sipped his tea and nibbled his sandwiches, and then Kurt played the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which has nothing to do with moonlight, but is an utterance of profound and poignant sorrow, suited to the mood of German cabinet members in these trying days. The weary man rested his nearly bald head in a soft chair and listened; when he asked for more, and said that he really meant it, Kurt played a couple of the tender little Songs without Words of Mendelssohn. Was he saying that the Jews had their place in German culture, and that their many kinds of services were appreciated by the Fatherland? Anyhow, it was a sign of understanding that an overburdened man of affairs was not asked to listen to noisy and disturbing music.
The minister and his friends were invited to come again, and said they would gladly do so. Their lovely hostess explained that she and her son did not like war, and had kept out of it, and had friends here who were supporting them in their efforts to bring the former foes together. If Dr. Rathenau or any of his staff would care to use Bienvenu as a place for inconspicuous meetings, the villa was at their service. Naturally this interested them, and Beauty told them about Mrs. Chattersworth and her other friends, and about the various British and French whom they knew and could invite to this place if requested. The German minister, who knew how the world was run, understood what all this meant. It was something beyond price in this crisis, and no price would be asked; but later, when the German republic had got on its feet, he might receive a note on perfumed stationery bearing the embossed initials or crest of this gracious lady, reminding him of their pleasant meetings at Cannes and inviting him to confer with her old friend and her son’s father, the European salesman of Budd Gunmakers Corporation.
V
Lanny told Rick about his talk with Barbara, and everything that she had told him; whereupon Rick, the newshound, pricked up his ears and said: “If that movement in Italy is spreading as fast as she says, there ought to be a story in it.”
“A horrible thing!” exclaimed Lanny.
“I know, but important. It’s the employers’ answer to Communism; and if one spreads, the other is bound to spread too. I ought to look into it.”
“Want me to take you to Italy after the conference?”
“Why bother, if the movement has come to us? Do you suppose we could find that fellow Mussolini?”
“I should think the Italians in Cannes would know about him. A pretty ugly customer, Rick.”
“We don’t have to worry about that. If he’s starting a movement, he’ll welcome publicity, you may be sure.”
Next morning Lanny drove his friend into the Old Town of Cannes, where there was a considerable Italian colony, and told the proprietor of a trattoria that he was trying to find a man named Benito Mussolini. The proprietor looked uneasy, and didn’t know whether to talk or not; but Lanny explained that an English newspaperman wished to interview him, and the other loosened up sufficiently to say that he was staying at a certain Casa della Rosa not far away.
The place didn’t deserve its name; it was dingy and decidedly third-class. When Lanny descended from his expensive car and went in, the neighborhood took note of it. When Lanny asked the woman in charge for Signor Mussolini, she looked him over carefully, went away, and came back with a sinister young fellow wearing a black shirt and having a bulge on his hip at exactly the spot where Lanny expected to find it. In his halting Italian Lanny explained that his friend wished to write an article about Signor Mussolini’s movement for a leading English magazine.
“Where is your friend?” asked the other, suspiciously, and Lanny explained that an aviator crippled in the war had trouble getting in and out of cars, and was waiting to make sure that the signor would see him. The young fellow went to the door and took a good look at the car and its occupant; then he said: “I will see.”
Presently the blackshirt returned and bade the two visitors follow him. They went down a hall and into a rear room which had only one window. The man they had come to meet had placed himself in an armchair in a corner at one side of the window; he had placed the chairs in which his visitors were to sit in the light of the window, so that they could be watched while he remained in shadow. An armed blackshirt stood near the window, and another by the wall in such a position that he was behind the two strangers. The one who escorted them remained on guard by the door. Evidently trust in one’s fellow-men was no part of the creed of the new movement called Fascismo!
VI
Benito Mussolini was at this time just under forty. He was a medium-small man who did everything in his power to look large. He had a high-domed forehead, partly bald, and melancholy black pop-eyes, suggestive of goiter to a physician. When he wanted to look stern and impressive, he would sit very stiff and erect, and make his lower jaw stick out; but sometimes he would forget and relax, and then you would discover that he had a weak face. He did not rise to greet visitors, but kept his pose of being on a throne.
“Eh b’en, mousseurs?” he said. His French was bad, but he did not seem to know it, or perhaps held himself above such concerns.
The English journalist, speaking slow and careful French, explained that, like the editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, he was covering the Cannes conference. He named the papers for which he wrote, and produced his credentials; one of the guards carried them to the great man.
“Where have you heard about my movement?” he asked.
“It has been attracting a great deal of attention in my country,” said Rick, tactfully. “Many people think it may offer a solution to the problem of the Reds.”
“You will do well to study it from that point of view.”
“I am here in the hope that you will make that possible, Signor Mussolini.”
Lanny planned to take no part in the conversation, but to devote himself to studying the Italian as well as the shadows permitted. It appeared as if his ego had expanded at the idea that his fame had spread so far; but then he decided that this was beneath the dignity of a man of destiny. An upper-class Englishman was trying to flatter the founder of Fascismo in the effort to get an interview! He remarked in a cold voice: “It is to be doubted if you English can learn the lessons of our movement, because your democratic capitalism represents a stage of social degeneration.”
“That may be,” said Rick, politely. “Of course if it were so, I should hardly know it.”
“That is true,” admitted the other. “But what can I do about that?”
To one who had nothing to do but lis
ten and watch, it became clear that the man was playing a part which was difficult for him; a person with a strong sense of inferiority, he was lifting himself by the straps of his boots. His rudeness betrayed self-distrust; his violence was a product of fear. “He’s a bounder!” thought Lanny.
Rick went on unruffled. “I hear contradictory statements about your movement, Signor. They tell me that it is anti-capitalist, and yet I find many of the capitalist class who support it ardently. Will you explain that to me?”
“They have perceived that the future is in our hands, because we represent the vital elements of the new awakening Italy. We are the youth—or those among them who are not satisfied with stale words and formulas, but believe in action and in new fortunes to be won.”
The founder of Fascismo was launched upon one of his orations. He had been delivering them once a week in his paper, ever since the war. He had been delivering them to his squadristi, the young men of Italy who had been trained in war and had been promised wealth and glory but had not got them, and were now organizing to help themselves. Their leader’s ideas were a strange mixture of the revolutionary syndicalist anarchism whose formulas had been the mental pabulum of his youth, and the new nationalism which he had learned from the poet-aviator d’Annunzio and his Fiume raiders. If you could believe Barbara, the blacksmith’s son had collected large sums of money for the support of the poet and had used them for his own movement. The ego of Benito Mussolini would bear no rival near the throne.
VII
The leader’s French was inadequate to the explaining of these complex ideas, and he would use Italian words, and then forget and break into Italian. Lanny ventured to stop him, saying: “Pardon, Signor, my friend does not understand your language, and my own is unfortunately bad. However, if you will speak slowly, I will endeavor to translate.”
The orator could not admit that his French was defective, and resumed speaking it. He explained his belief that violence is a sign of virility, and that any society in which it does not have its way is bound to degenerate. “I see that you have been reading Sorel,” ventured Rick.
“I do not have to go to Sorel for knowledge,” replied Mussolini, with a thrust of his jaw. “I was a pupil of Pareto, in Lausanne.”
Rick asked him about the application of violence in the daily affairs of the Italian workers, and the leader made no bones about admitting that he and his fasci di combattimento were using it in abundance. “Italy has been kept in chaos by the Reds for three years, and we are giving them doses of their own medicine.”
“And when you have put them down, what then?”
“Ours is no mere movement of repression, but an awakening of those elements which alone are capable of reconstructing la patria.”
“Just what is to be the nature of your construction?”
“A state in which all the various social groups have their proper places and perform their assigned functions under the direction of their leader.”
“That being yourself?”
“Who else could it be?” This with another thrust of the jaw and a straightening of the shoulders. “You do not believe that I can do these things?”
Said Rick: “You would hardly be interested in the opinion of a representative of a degenerating society.”
It was the sort of reply the editor had been wont to exchange in the days when he was a Socialist intellectual, sipping his red wine in the trattorie. For a few minutes he forgot that he was a man of destiny, being interviewed for posterity; he relaxed on his throne and crossed his legs, arguing with two bright young fellows who might be turned into disciples. “You will have to learn from us,” he announced. “Our Fascismo is not for export; but you will have to devise some remedy of your own for the contradictions which bourgeois democracy is developing.”
“Si, Signor,” said Rick. “But what if the ambitions of your Italian Fascism happen to clash with those of French imperialism, or German, for example?”
“There is enough and plenty to go round.”
“Enough of what, exactly?” It was a trap question. Could it be that what this blacksmith’s son from the Romagna had in mind was to divide the colonial possessions of the degenerating British Empire?
“The world is large,” said the leader, smiling, “and the future is not easy to foresee. Tell me, are you going back to lie about me, as so many other journalists have done?”
This was meant for a diversion, and it served. “I am not that sort of journalist, Signor. I shall report exactly what I have seen and heard.”
“Do you express no opinions of your own?”
“Sometimes—but always making plain that it is opinion and nothing else.”
“And what will you say is your opinion of Fascismo?”
It was a condescension. The ego of the one-time proletarian starveling could not repress a desire for applause from a son of the effete British aristocracy! “May I speak frankly?” inquired Rick.
“What else would be of interest to me?”
“Well, I am struck by the resemblance of your technique to that of Bolshevism, which you so despise. In many ways you speak like a pupil of Lenin rather than Pareto.”
“You are a shrewd young man. But why should I not learn from Lenin how to fight Lenin? If I capture a gun from a foe, shall I refrain from using it because it is the foe’s invention?”
“I see,” said Rick. “Would it be correct to say that your movement is one of middle-class youth, whereas Bolshevism is one of proletarian youth?”
“We bring all youth into our movement, and we guide them.”
“To be sure,” countered the other. “But that is what the Russians say also. You have different ends, but your means are the same. To us Englishmen it appears that your means will determine your ends in the long run.”
“You watch us,” said the founder of Fascismo. “We will show you something about a long run. My successor has not been born yet.”
When the two went out to their car and drove away, Lanny said: “That fellow strikes me as a pretty cheap actor.”
“Yes, but he has something, as you Americans say.”
“Do you think he can make a go of it?”
“He might—in Italy. They are a turbulent people, and easy to fool. But of course some other upstart would unhorse him in a few months.”
VIII
In the midst of these events Lanny received a letter from his father. Another international conference had been going on in Washington for two months, and to Robbie Budd it was like a perpetual toothache deliberately inflicted—and all the worse because it was being done by those whom he had helped to put in office. A “naval limitations conference,” it was called, and the American Secretary of State had electrified the world, and almost electrocuted Robbie, by presenting an offer of the United States to stop its fleet-building program, which included sixteen capital ships and nearly as many old ones, in return for similar concessions by other nations and an agreement for each nation to keep a certain fixed ratio of naval strength.
To Robbie it was like the cutting off of parts of his own body. He really loved those beautiful ships—and especially he loved the deadly swift machine guns with which Budd’s had been prepared to equip them and all their auxiliary vessels. It meant that contracts carefully and patiently negotiated would never be signed; it meant that workmen of Budd’s would be idle, and their families would go without food, or at any rate without silk stockings and new cars. It meant that blundering fool politicians and pacifists with their heads in the clouds would lead the nation into a trap from which it might never escape. “The formula was supplied to Hughes by the British,” wrote Robbie, “and the trap is of their making. Some day we shall need those ships, need them desperately and horribly, and then we shall mourn for them as a barren woman mourns for the children she didn’t bear.” It was the first time in Lanny’s twenty-two years that he had known his father to become poetical.
The crime was going to be committed, and no stopping it. Robbi
e had gone to Washington and made sure. Nobody would listen to him, because he sold munitions and they took it for granted that he was thinking only about the money. As if a man didn’t love his work; as if he didn’t love the efficient things he made; as if he didn’t think about the nation they were designed to protect! “We have the richest country in the world, and we should have the greatest fleet to protect us; we have earned that right and we should take it. But Britain is broke, and Japan is poor, and we let them lure us into a confidence game and persuade us to pare our fleet down to the level of what they can afford!”
It was a hard matter to satisfy patriots, Lanny observed. Here in Cannes, and even in his own home, he was hearing about the Washington conference from the point of view of the British and the French, and discovering that they were as ill-pleased as his father. To the French it was just one more diddling, one more combining of Britain and America against la patrie. The conference was proposing to restrict the submarine, the poor nation’s weapon! If France gave it up, Britain would rule—and of course use her power, as she was using it now, to compel France to submit to being cheated by Germany! Briand had been to Washington, and had there heard criticisms of French “militarism”; they had actually suggested that France agree to the reducing of her army! What protection would they leave her? She had persuaded President Wilson to give her a guarantee against attack, but the United States Senate failed to ratify this agreement—and now they wanted to strip the nation of her last means of security!
So said a member of Briand’s delegation in the drawing-room of Bienvenu; sitting in the same chair that Rathenau had occupied—though he didn’t know it. He was talking to M. Rochambeau, the kindly and well-informed diplomat; and Marie was listening, deeply impressed by what her country’s statesman was saying. For several days Lanny had been realizing that she was less and less pleased with what the other ladies were doing; that what they considered triumphs seemed like defeats to her. After this talk she came to him and said: “I think it would be better if I went and stayed a few days with my aunt. I am sure you will understand.”
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 26