This discussion occurred in the intervals of a bridge game, and the fourth hand was M. Rochambeau, old friend of the family. A retired diplomat had time for reading, and he told Lanny about a novel by an American expatriate named Henry James; it was called The Ambassadors, and Lanny borrowed it. He was bewildered at first, but he put his mind upon the disentangling of those tremendous sentences, carrying a heavier burden of qualifications, reservations, modifications, stipulations, circumstantiations, elucidations, and other assorted subtleties than had ever before been crowded between two small black dots on a printed page. But finally he got into the story, and of course saw himself in that expatriate Bostonian, and watched the uncovering of his deadly sin in Paris. He finished the book before he left Juan, fully decided in his mind not to take the chance of bringing Marie’s and Esther’s progeny together.
What happened was that Marie chanced to visit the exposition at a time when Esther and her brood were there, and Lanny hardly dared speak a civil word to his amie in his stepmother’s presence. After the ordeal was over and he met Marie at their rendezvous, she gave him proof of the strange intuitive powers of the experienced woman of society. Said she: “Your sister and Hansi have fallen in love.”
“Oh, surely not!” exclaimed the stupid male creature.
“They are so much in love that their eyes cannot neet without a flutter.”
“I thought she was moved by his music.”
“Women aren’t moved by music,” declared Marie. “Women are moved by musicians.”
XI
A day or two later Hansi came to Lanny and confessed. Bess was leaving in a couple of days, and he might never see her again. What should he do? He couldn’t keep the tears from his eyes.
Lanny talked it out with him. He said that, so far as he personally was concerned, he thought it would be a grand match, and he would try to make it. Doubtless it would win him the everlasting enmity of his stepmother, who was bound to have some high state enterprise in mind—it would be the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and her daughter Marie Antoinette.
“How will your father feel about it?” Hansi wanted to know.
“Robbie’s a pretty good sport,” replied Lanny. “He has some of the fashionable prejudices—we’ve got to face the facts, you know, Hansi.”
“Of course. I know I’m a Jew.”
“Robbie likes your father, and he admires you. He doesn’t know much about music, but if you make a success he will hear about it.”
“I must make a success, Lanny! I have waited too long!” Poor Hansi’s proud aloofness had been knocked into a cocked hat.
“You’re both young yet.”
“Listen, Lanny—this is important. I have an old teacher who has moved to New York. He was in Berlin this spring and heard me play, and said he might get me a chance to make my debut with the New York Symphony there.”
“Oh, grand! That would be a wallop!”
“You think Bess would come to hear me?”
“Of course she’d come. Maybe I could pull wires and arrange for you to give a concert in Newcastle. After the New York appearance, of course!”
Lanny advised Hansi to speak to Bess, but said he couldn’t do it; his teeth chattered when he even thought of it. And, besides, what chance did he have? They wouldn’t leave him alone with her for a minute. He could only speak with his music, and hope that she would get its meaning. Lanny replied that while program music was supposed to portray all sorts of natural phenomena, he didn’t know any that would set a date for a wedding.
XII
They were going to the Louvre that afternoon. Lanny spent some time explaining the Mona Lisa to his half-sister, pointing out its qualities and telling her about Leonardo. When the others moved on he said: “Let’s stroll the other way. I want to show you something.”
They strolled; and perhaps Esther noticed it, but she couldn’t very well object, for she had Hansi by her side, and it was of him that she was afraid. Lanny took Bess to a seat and got her firmly settled so that she wouldn’t keel over; then he said: “Look here, kid; Hansi’s in love with you.”
She caught her hands together. “Oh, Lanny!” and then again: “Oh, Lanny!” Lovers are rarely original, and what seems eloquence to them doesn’t impress a third party, the sober man at the feast. “Lanny, are you sure?”
“He has chills and fever whenever he speaks your name.”
“Oh, dear, I’m so happy!”
“Did you think you weren’t good enough for him?”
“I thought I didn’t have anything he’d care for. I’m just a stupid child.”
“Well, he assumes that you’ll grow up.”
“Will he wait for me?”
“I’m sure he will, if you ask him to.”
“But he ought to ask me, Lanny!”
“He’s too frightened of our god-awful family.”
“But Hansi is a wonderful person! He has more than all of us put together.”
“In his heart I dare say he knows it; but he doesn’t think that we know it. It’ll make the devil of a row, you know, for you to marry a Jew.”
“Tell me, Lanny, do you think there’s anything wrong with the Jews?”
“Bless your heart, old dear, there are so many things wrong with all of us—thee and me included.”
“But I mean—so many people look down on them. What is the reason?”
“Well, Mrs. Emily thinks they have better brains than we have; or maybe they work them harder.”
“Jesus was a Jew, Lanny!”
“I know; but the rest of them treated him badly, and they’ve been paying for it ever since.”
“Lanny, I ought to tell Mummy, don’t you think?”
“Indeed, I think it’s the last thing on earth you should do!”
“But I want to be fair to her and Father!”
“If you tell her, you’ll just keep her in misery, and she’ll do the same for you. If you part friends with Hansi, she’ll hope that you’ll forget him, and you can go on with your school work without any fuss.”
“But Hansi and I will have to write to each other.”
“Write nice friendly letters—‘All well, and hope to see you soon.’ Tell him the news, and let your mother see his letters. Sign them all, ‘yours truly’—that’s enough.”
“Are you sure it’ll be enough for Hansi?”
“He’ll be walking on the clouds until the day comes.”
“And then what, Lanny?”
“Wait until you’re eighteen; then, if you haven’t changed your mind, tell your mother that you’re going to get married.”
“How will she take it?”
“Pretty hard, I imagine; you’ll have to be ready for the worst. But have your mind made up, and don’t give way. It’s your affair; it means more to you than it can mean to anybody else.” He thought for a space and then added: “Perhaps it might be wiser to go to Robbie first and get him on your side. You’ll have a hold on him, because Grandfather broke up his love affair when he was young, and he knows how it feels. He told me all about it, and he took it terribly hard. Remind him of it, and that will break him down!”
24
To Madness Near Allied
I
The new Tory government of England rejected the Geneva Protocol, which had been planned to bring peace to Europe by the method of boycotting aggressor states. The British gave several reasons, the most important being that the United States refused to pledge its support to the program. If the aggressor could buy all he needed from one great country, the other countries would be depriving their businessmen of profitable trade to no purpose. That statement set everybody in the States to debating; the Wilsonites, of whom there were many, insisted that their country was betraying the hopes of mankind. The crippled champion of internationalism had been in his grave more than a year, but his arguments lived on, and Lanny listened and as usual saw both sides of a complicated question.
Robbie Budd came over on some of his many affairs. He w
as the plumed knight of isolationism, riding at the head of the procession with a pennon on his lance. He said that both Britain and France were stumbling in the march of history, and might soon fall out. They were adhering “to antiquated methods in industry and refusing to modernize their plants. America, on the other hand, renewed its machinery every decade, and could turn out goods faster and better than any other nation. All we had to do was to arm ourselves and be ready to meet all comers, but keep out of other people’s quarrels. Let them destroy themselves if they wanted to; on that basis the world would be ours.
Robbie worshiped a deity known as laissez faire. Let manufacturers everywhere produce what goods they pleased and offer them in whatever market they could find; let government keep its hands off, and the intelligent men of the United States would make prosperity permanent. In the old days there had been crises and panics, but Robbie said that modern technology had solved that problem; mass production of goods at ever-cheapening prices was the answer to everything. Employers could afford to pay high wages, money would buy more and more, the workers would attain an ever-higher standard of living. The solution of this problem was America’s; no other nation could approach her, and the one thing she had to fear was political demagogues throwing monkey-wrenches into the machinery. Robbie said he didn’t know why that name had been given to a useful tool, but it fitted the politicians who presumed to meddle with the production and distribution of goods.
Fortunately, the country had that most admirable of presidents, that strong silent statesman who never interfered with anything, but was happy to stroll through the power-plant and listen to the rich humming of the dynamos. Nobody was going to get Cautious Cal into any sort of foreign entanglement, no one was going to get him to stop any American oil man or munitions man from selling his products wherever in the world he could find a customer with the cash. The Vermont country storekeeper’s son was going to sit tight in the comfortable mansion which the government provided him and save all he could of the $6125 per month which would fall due to him, up to and including the fourth day of March 1929. To Robbie Budd that was equivalent to saying that God was in His heaven and all was right with the world.
Robbie himself was “sitting pretty,” but of course in a much more highly priced seat. He never told his son just how much his services to his country were bringing him, but from one sign and another Lanny knew that it was a very large sum. When Lanny said that he no longer needed the three hundred a month that his father was sending him, Robbie smiled and said it would be too much of an effort remembering to tell his secretary to stop it. When Bub Smith presented a bill for salary and expenses incurred in certain confidential work having to do with Standard Oil in the Near East, Robbie glanced at the account and read: “Eight thousand one hundred and seventy-five dollars and twenty-eight cents.” He wrote a check for ten thousand, and remarked: “I couldn’t manage to get all those figures straight.”
II
A delightful thing to have such a father—and a temptation to agree with him on matters of business and finance. Very certainly the system of laissez faire was vindicating itself so far as it concerned Lanny Budd’s own affairs. That system was pouring thousands of rich people into the playground of Europe, their pockets bulging with more money than they knew how to spend; quite literally bulging, for Lanny met men who thought nothing of carrying a hundred thousand-franc notes in a billfold, and when he asked one of them why he did it, the answer was: “Well, I might want to invite you to lunch.” If these people had any culture at all—and many of them did—it was the easiest thing in the world to seduce them with the prestige of great paintings. Lanny’s position became that of the fisherman on the rivers of Oregon during the latter part of the month of July; catching salmon becomes a labor, not a sport, and one never wants to see or smell or taste another fish.
People came every day and begged to look at Detazes, until that too became a nuisance; you had heard everything said that could be said, and you suspected the motives of people who posed as your friends and hoped to get a lower figure. “Boost the prices,” Robbie said—that being the businessman’s way of reducing an excessive demand. But it didn’t seem to work in the case of art, for there was no way to determine the cost of a canvas; it was worth what you could get, and the more you asked, the more the customer seemed to value it. The dealers would come, and when you showed reluctance to sell they would assume that it was a business maneuver, and would go on making offers until it became fantastic. Lanny thought this couldn’t last, but Zoltan was in command, and he said there might be a break in the case of work that was faddish, but not for solid merit like Marcel’s. Ask a high price, pay some of the money as a tip to get the high price talked about in the papers—and then you could ask still higher prices!
Lanny had so much money that he didn’t know what to do with it, and had to ask his father’s advice. To Robbie that was a delightful experience; to have this playboy, of whose future on its practical side he had begun to despair, come of his own free will and ask how to invest a hundred thousand dollars that he had earned without a stroke of help from his father—well, that was something to go home and tell to the old man of the Budd tribe! Robbie sat down and made out a schedule of what he called a “portfolio,” a list of gilt-edged stocks and bonds which his son was to acquire. Robbie took as much interest in it as if it had been one of those crossword puzzles which had become the rage. He wanted to explain it to Lanny item by item—A. & P., A. T. & T., A. T. & S. F.—as if Lanny could ever remember all those initials! The son wrote a check on his bank in Cannes, the father sent a cablegram, and, by the magic which American businessmen had contrived, all those valuable pieces of paper were in a vault in Lanny’s name before he had gone to sleep that evening. Robbie estimated that his son would enjoy an income of more than seven hundred dollars a month for the rest of his days, and without ever doing anything but signing his name. How could anybody question the soundness of a world in which such a miracle could be wrought?
Yet Lanny couldn’t keep himself from performing that unreasonable mental action. No longer an innocent child, he looked about him at the idlers of this Côte d’Azur and they had ceased to appear glamorous. He saw gambling and drinking and assorted vice, and what seemed to him an orgy of foolish and profitless activity. He saw swarms of parasites preying upon the rich, getting their money by a thousand devices, few of them so harmless as persuading them to purchase old masters. He saw, too, the signs of poverty and strain; when he went into the great cities he was made sick by the spectacle of human degradation, and he had too much brains to be able to salve his conscience by giving a coin to a beggar now and then, as some of his kind-hearted friends would do.
The spacious drawing-room of Bienvenu was cool on hot days, and a generous open fire kept it warm on cold nights. In it were courtesy, kindness, love, and every kind of beauty that the skills of men had been able to create: oriental rugs of rich harmonious colors on the floor, inspired paintings on the walls, long shelves full of masterpieces of literature old and new, the music of a piano, a phonograph, and the newly devised radio at command. But outside, waves of human misery beat against the foundations and winds of social rage howled about the eaves. The ladies of this house cried to Lanny: “Why have we worked so hard to make safety and comfort for you, only to see you go out into the midst of storm and danger? Is it because we haven’t done our duty? Is it lack of devotion or of charm on our part that you wish to throw yourself into a chaos of clamoring greeds and hates?”
III
In Cannes lived a Spanish youth by the name of Raoul Palma. He was an ardent Socialist, and had brought a letter of introduction from Jean Longuet; “a faithful party worker,” was the editor’s phrase. Physically Raoul was a study for a painter; slender yet active, with delicately chiseled features and an expression of sweetness almost feminine—Lanny wished that Marcel had been there to immortalize him. The young man spoke all the languages of the Latin tribes, and had a good education, but
worked in a shoe-store because that appeared to be the only employment available to one who wished to spend his evenings agitating for Socialism among the workers.
Cannes was thought of as a playground for the rich; a city of lovely villas and gardens, a paradise of fashionable elegance. Few stopped to realize what a mass of labor was required to maintain that cleanliness and charm: not merely the servants who dwelt on the estates, but porters and truckdrivers, scrubwomen and chambermaids, kitchen-workers, food-handlers; and scores of obscure occupations which the rich never heard about. These people were housed in slum warrens, that “cabbage patch” where Lanny’s Red uncle had taken him to meet Barbara Pugliese. The ladies and gentlemen of fashion didn’t know that such places existed; they could hardly believe you when you told them—and they wouldn’t thank you for having told them.
If the slums of the Riviera were ever to be razed and decent housing provided, it could only be through the action of the workers themselves; the rich wouldn’t make any move unless they were forced-: The question was whether it was to be done by the method which the world had seen in Russia and didn’t like so well, or whether it could be carried out by orderly democratic process, such as the workers of Vienna and other Socialist cities were proceeding to apply. Which way you chose determined whether you called yourself a Communist or a Socialist; whether your opponents named you Red or Pink. Raoul Palma, idealist and something of a saint, persisted in advocating the patient and peaceful way. His hobby was what he called “workers’ education”; he wanted to get the tired laborers to come to school at night and learn the rudiments of modern economic theory: just how their labor was exploited and just what they could do about it. He wanted a Socialist Sunday school, to which the workers’ children might come and learn those facts which were not taught in schools conducted by their masters.
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 53