Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  Nobody was promoting Hansi Robin; he knew how it was done but didn’t want it. Having the good fortune to have a rich father, he was helping several poor students at the conservatory. What he wanted for himself was to play the best music as perfectly as possible, and he said that when he could do that he would make a public appearance and wouldn’t need any promotion. He was learning Joachim’s great Hungarian Concerto, which he said would delight Zoltan. He played difficult things such as Paganini’s Moto Perpetuo, but he didn’t love technique for its own sake—he spoke with scorn of “finger gymnastics.” He and Lanny played Mozart’s sonatas, and he extracted loveliness from them just as diligently as if he had had several thousand people listening. Lanny couldn’t be sure how much was Mozart and how much was Hansi, but he felt sure that some day audiences would throng to hear this playing; and of course he had only to say this in order to transport all the Robins into their Jewish heaven. Lanny didn’t know just what they had in that heaven, but he knew that Elijah—or was it Elisha?—had been taken up there in a chariot of fire. He was sure also that the residents there would play Ravel’s Kaddisch, and Ernest Bloch’s Schelomo, which Hansi had transcribed for violin.

  One interesting discovery for Lanny: this young virtuoso had turned into a full-fledged Socialist. He had carried out his promise to study the movement, and announced his conviction that it held the hopes of the future. He wasn’t ever going to put a party label on himself, but he would play his music for the people at prices they could pay, and he would play their kind of music if he could find it. Lanny asked what Papa Robin thought of this, and Hansi said that Papa wanted his boy to believe what seemed good to him. Whether this would hold if Hansi should ever leave his studies and get into a conflict, say with Generalissimo Balbo, Lanny ventured to doubt; but he didn’t suggest it, not wishing to trouble the soul of a sensitive and noble-minded youth.

  III

  Lanny and Kurt went on to Stubendorf, in company with Emil; the Reds had been definitely put down, so army officers could have Christmas leaves. At the Schloss things were much the same, except that one of the two young widows, Kurt’s sister, had been married to a middle-aged official of the neighborhood; not a love match, but men of her own age were scarce, and this was a well-domesticated gentleman who would be kind to her children. Lanny loved German music, German cheer and Gemütlichkeit; how he wished there might be some way to extract and eliminate from these people those aggressive qualities which caused the rest of Europe to fear them so greatly!

  Among those they met was Heinrich Jung. He too had grown several inches and was a grand and sturdy forester; he was going to school for two years more, to make himself a real expert; Germany was setting the world an example in the conservation of her forest treasures, and the blond and blue-eyed Heinrich studied with a sense of consecration to the Fatherland. He talked with fervor about the National Socialist movement, to which he was still devoted, in spite of the debacle it had sustained the year before. The leaders of that putsch had all been tried, and Adi, their favorite orator, had delivered a masterpiece of oratory in court. He and his associates had been convicted and sentenced to several years’ “detention” in the fortress of Landsberg, but a few days ago they had all been let out on parole.

  During the period of their incarceration Heinrich had traveled to the fortress to take gifts to the captives, and he was full of the ardors inspired by this visit. He reported that the prisoners had been well treated, it being recognized that their motives were patriotic; they had had better food than most of them had ever enjoyed previously. The young forester was a serious acolyte, with no trace of a sense of humor where his cause was concerned; he had no idea that he was amusing Lanny when he explained that Adi’s oratory was adapted to audiences in large halls and not to the confinement of a cell, so his companions had suggested the writing of his memoirs as a means of keeping him occupied. Heinrich reported that he had produced a massive manuscript, and that some of the others were helping to revise it. Lanny said it ought to make an unusual book, and Heinrich promised to send him a copy when it was published.

  IV

  The story of these martyrdoms produced in Kurt Meissner that state of melancholy for which the German soul is celebrated; he was led to pour out his feelings to Lanny after a fashion which he had not used for a long time. It was agony to the ex-officer to see the Fatherland despoiled, dismembered, and helpless in the hands of its foes. All the country’s financial affairs and most of its economic affairs were now under the control of the Reparations Commission, and Kurt said it was evident that they never intended to release their stranglehold. Germany was down; and how could the German soul develop while the German body lay bound and gagged?

  Lanny thought: “Certainly not gagged, for it’s making an almighty clamor.” But he didn’t say this. He pointed out to Kurt that reversals of fortune were no new thing in Europe. A little more than a century ago Napoleon had held the great part of Germany and Austria; a little more than a half-century ago Germany had conquered France. “You have to allow a little time for the passions of war to cool off, and the balance will right itself.”

  Kurt argued that balances had no such power. Whatever happened would have to be done by men. “Germans have to make an effort; they have to struggle against oppression and enslavement. The intellectual and spiritual leaders have to supply the courage and devotion to country.”

  In short, Kurt was in a mood of martyrdom, and Lanny knew what that meant. The ex-officer’s conscience was troubling him about going back to the land of his foes to live in peace and comfort with a beautiful blond mistress. He was too polite to say this to the son of that mistress; he wouldn’t even say it symbolically, by referring to Samson and Delilah, to Antony and Cleopatra. But he talked about Wordsworth’s “Stern Daughter of the Voice of God,” and Lanny in return reminded his friend of the fact that all through the struggle against Napoleon the serene Goethe had continued his labors as thinker and artist.

  “But he was a much older man,” argued the German. “He couldn’t have fought.”

  “He could have gone into the political struggle, and have tried to inspire the Germans to resistance. But he really believed in the importance of art, and he left us products of his genius which are still working when the political problems of the time are forgotten.”

  “I know, I know,” Kurt said—for Lanny was speaking his own language here. “But the suffering is so dreadful, it throws me into a state of despair whenever I think about it.”

  “I dare say that happened to Goethe also. It is your problem as an artist to find a way to embody those feelings in the art which you have chosen.” Not for the first time, Lanny quoted Goethe’s verses to the effect that he who had never eaten his bread with tears, who had never sat by his bed weeping, knew not the heavenly powers. Not for the first time in his struggles with his friend, Lanny thanked God for Goethe! He had even taught Beauty about the august Olympian of Weimar, and about the ladies who had comforted him—so that she might be able to present herself under a more dignified guise than that of Delilah or Cleopatra.

  V

  They came back to Juan, and Rick and his family arrived in a few days. Rick was planning a play, and intending to devote himself to it all winter and permit nothing to interrupt him. Exciting to the impressionable Lanny to know that a masterpiece of music was being composed in one corner of the estate and a masterpiece of drama in another. It never troubled the young lord of the manor that he had no masterpieces of his own to contribute. Perhaps one might say that he was producing masterpieces of friendship, giving two artists a place where they could work unhindered, and providing that sympathy and admiration which appear to be essential to their functioning.

  There was the estate with three pairs of lovers and four assorted fruits of love—Lanny counting in both classifications. Rick and Nina had the only marriage certificate on the premises, and there were people outside who turned up their noses at Bienvenu, saying, like Kurt’s aunt, the F
rau Doktor Hofrat von und zu Nebenaltenberg: “Unschicklich!” But such persons didn’t really belong on the Coast of Pleasure. Those who stayed permanently came to realize that morals are a matter of geography, and that love and kindness in the heart count for more than any legal document stuck away in the bottom of a trunk. So, at least, it seemed to Lanny, and he was content to choose his friends among those who agreed with him; in fact he hardly knew that the others existed.

  February was the month for Kurt’s annual recital at Sept Chênes. This was really a favor that Emily Chattersworth did him, but she insisted upon sending him a check for two thousand francs; it provided all the pocket money he needed for a year, and thus helped to preserve his self-respect. There was always a rumbling and thundering of piano practice for this event, for Kurt was the most fastidious of virtuosi, and every phrase of one of his compositions was sacred to him. A week or so before the event he would begin worrying as to whether his selection of pieces was the best. He would ask Lanny’s advice, and Lanny would point out the danger that, loving his music so intensely, Kurt was apt to give his audience more than it could carry away. To most fashionable people a musicale was an occasion for displaying their finery, and for exchanging chit-chat with other prominent persons. They wanted the music to be cheerful and brief.

  Kurt’s certainly wasn’t either of these. He was packing sorrow and revolt into his work, more of it than could be contained within the classical forms he favored. Pretty soon people would be calling him a “modernist,” and that would distress him; he would go off and shut himself away more persistently than ever. Kurt wanted to tell the world that the German soul was in chains; while what the world wanted was to eat, drink, and be merry, and not be reminded that there was suffering anywhere. Dressed in his tails and fresh white tie, Kurt remarked on his way to Sept Chenes that he was Wagner producing Tannhäuser before the members of the Jockey Club of Paris.

  He rendered a new composition of his own to which he had given the odd title Inner Life. Most of those present were reducing their inner lives to the minimum, and didn’t like the idea of having them exposed even to themselves; but they couldn’t get away from the realization that something tremendous was going on here, and a few led in vigorous applause, and made it quite an event. As a result, the conductor of the orchestra in one of the Riviera casinos invited Kurt to give his piano concerto, and actually offered to pay him five hundred francs, at the prevailing rate of exchange about twenty dollars. As the orchestra would have to have all the parts copied out for the various instruments, they were really doing an unknown man, and a German, a great honor.

  Of course it wasn’t a first-rate orchestra, but all the same it was a chance for Kurt to hear his own orchestration for the first time in his life. He was as much excited as Beauty could have wanted him to be; those musicians who had to play regularly for the entertainment of gamblers and dancers were asked to come overtime and rehearse with an unknown genius—and strangely enough many of them caught his enthusiasm and tried to become a good orchestra. Lanny would drive Kurt in, and sometimes Rick would go along, neglecting his own chef-d’oeuvre. A fire came from somewhere—the Greeks said from heaven—and entered the hearts of men; it came unannounced and in unexpected places, perhaps after you had given up hope of it and had even forgotten its existence; it overcame men’s jealousies and suspicions, and they began to run here and there and whisper excitedly; there was a rustling and a murmur, as of the wind stirring in the myriad leaves of a grove sacred to the Muses.

  VI

  Robbie Budd came along on one of his business trips. He stayed for several days with Lanny in his studio, and told Beauty to “blow herself” to the grandest possible party. She gave her vote for an al fresco luncheon on the lawn at Bienvenu; caterers would bring it from Cannes, and there would be an orchestra and dancing, or tennis, or bridge—whatever people wanted. The weather proved friendly and it was a delightful occasion; Beauty’s friends came to meet her former husband—so he was called—and speculate as to whether she was taking up with him again. Since the alleged “music-teacher” from Germany was on hand, they supposed not, but hoped for the worst.

  Robbie always brought something from America, usually some new gadget of the sort for which the Yankees were famous: electrical irons for curling ladies’ hair, or a device that you could put on the breakfast table to make your own toast—what wouldn’t they think of next? Last year he had brought a thing called a radio-set; an extraordinary invention—the air or whatever it was all around you was full of music, and there was a tube with two prongs which you stuck into your ears and you could plainly hear a whole orchestra. This time the traveler brought a bigger and better one, having a horn like a phonograph, so that you could hear the music anywhere in the room, and could dance to it. You could even listen to a man making a speech in Paris! Robbie said this invention might provide a new method of controlling public opinion; you could tell the people whatever you pleased and they had no way to answer back! He had bought a patent and launched a company to manufacture a set that didn’t have to have batteries, but could be plugged into an electric light circuit, and you could make it as loud as you pleased. Imagine thousands of people sitting in a hall, and a great voice roaring to them about the dangers of voting for the other fellow’s candidate!

  Robbie appreciated this idea, for his native land had just passed through a red-hot Presidential campaign. There was what Robbie called a demagogue by the name of La Follette who had come near to ousting Robbie’s prize President, the “strong silent statesman.” Robbie got fun out of that phrase, for he had met “Cautious Cal” during the campaign and put up a lot of money to elect him, and might have become ambassador to France if he had been willing to give up his lucrative contract with Budd Gunmakers. Robbie said Cal was the funniest little man that had ever come out of the Green Mountains. He was so cautious that he didn’t talk even to his wife. She told a story about how he went to church, and when he came home she asked him if the sermon had been good, and he said yes, and then she asked what the preacher had preached about and he said: “About sin.” The wife asked: “What did he say about it?” and the answer was: “He was agin it.”

  The opposite of the silent Coolidge was the overtalkative Scotchman, Ramsay MacDonald; at about the same time that Cal was elected, Ramsay was ousted, and once more there was a Tory Prime Minister of Britain. Robbie said that was all to the good, for now the two countries could get their affairs on a business basis. Robbie listened politely to the “liberal” ideas of Lanny’s English chum and didn’t argue with him, but when he was alone with his son he said that the British “liberals” and all others were in for a sad disillusioning as to the conduct of the United States. The first thing Britain had to do, if she expected any sort of co-operation in future, was to get busy and pay the debts she owed. Robbie had spoken to the President on this subject, and the country storekeeper’s son summed up his attitude in six plain Yankee words: “They hired the money, didn’t they?”

  Lanny had been hearing a lot about those war debts in Geneva, and he asked by what means they could be paid. Robbie was ready with an answer—he always was. He said that British citizens owned billions of dollars’ worth of American stocks and bonds, and if Britain wished to she could tax those citizens and buy those securities to be turned over to the United States government. The reason the British wouldn’t do it was plain enough—they were afraid for their world position in the face of intensified competition, and if they kept their claims upon American industrial plants they were sure of having some income anyhow!

  VII

  One of the purposes for which Robbie had come south was to see Zaharoff, so Lanny drove him to “Monty” and sat in at one of their sessions. The munitions king of Europe had at last obtained that prize which all his wealth had been unable to buy him—the wife for whom he had had to wait thirty-four years. The madman in the Spanish asylum had passed away, and just before Lanny had set out for Geneva the seventy-five-year-old Knight
Commander of the Bath had escorted his lady-love, the Duquesa Maria del Pilar Antonia Angela Patrocino Simón de Muguiro y Berute, Duquesa de Marqueni y Villafranca de los Caballeros, to the mairie of the small town of Arronville, near the great estate of Château de Balincourt which Zaharoff owned. There the duquesa, now in her sixties, was made Lady Zaharoff in a strictly private wedding, the crowds being kept at a distance and the shutters of the mairie closed so that people with opera glasses couldn’t see in. Lanny had read in the Paris Temps an account of the event, somewhat playful but still respectful, giving no hint of the fact that the elderly couple had been living together all over the continent of Europe for more than a generation.

  Lanny listened while the two businessmen discussed oil company reports, bond issues, expansion plans, the personalities of executives, and of statesmen whom they considered as executives somewhat more tricky and difficult to control. Lanny was again surprised to realize how deeply his father was involved in money transactions with this man whom in former days he had described by names such as “old spider” and “lone gray wolf.” Pecunia non olet was one of the few Latin phrases which Robbie had brought away from Yale—perhaps because it was associated with a slightly off-color story which had caught a college youth’s fancy. Certainly Sir Basil’s money now smelled sweet to the Connecticut Yankee, and the smear of oil which ran all through their conversation didn’t offend his aesthetic sense.

  Lanny listened to many things which the world would have paid a high price to know; among them the financial difficulties in which the enormous institution of Vickers was involved. The old Greek trader was withdrawing from the company, and hinted that he had unloaded a lot of his securities, but he didn’t give any figures; he had been scared by all this peace talk, and had seen what was coming to the munitions industry in a world which scrapped its battleships and talked about boycotting aggressor states. He and Robbie discussed the subject in detail, and differed about it, for Robbie had got some small contracts for Budd’s and hoped to get more on this trip; Zaharoff said that such contracts might help out a small concern like Budd’s, but not Vickers.