Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  Raoul had got a little group together, and they had raised a few francs from their earnings and bought pencils and paper and set to work, at first in an open shed in summer, then in an unused storeroom. They needed more money; and how could Lanny, believing what he did, fail to help them? He rented a proper room with a stove to heat it when the mistral blew; when he saw how pathetically grateful they were, and how fast the enterprise expanded, he offered the young leader a pension of fifty francs a week, about two dollars, so that he might retire from the business of fitting shoes on ladies’ feet and devote all his time to workers’ education. Lanny would go now and then to the Sunday school, and thereby he acquired a number of what the ladies of his family considered undesirable acquaintances; he learned the names of a swarm of little brats who of course didn’t know that they were brats, and would come running up to greet him when he was on his way into a fashionable hotel or restaurant, throwing their arms about him and calling him “Comrade Lanny”; which was hardly en regie, to say the least.

  Lanny had entertained his little half-sister with Beethoven’s Contra-Dances: delightful tunes with pronounced rhythms, to which she and Nina’s children would caper about the room like incipient Isadoras. Why not have an entertainment for the children of the workers, and give them a chance to develop their latent talents? If Lanny could have had his way he would have brought the whole troop to Bienvenu and let them dance on the loggia, and Marceline with them; but the bare idea frightened Beauty out of a night’s sleep. To her the very word “workers” spelt Red revolution and bloodshed; she had White Russian friends in Cannes and elsewhere who told her terrible stories of the outrages from which they had escaped. Out of the kindness of her heart, Beauty gave these people money, and a part of it went to maintain White Russian papers and propaganda in Paris. So Beauty’s money worked against Lanny’s money, and perhaps neutralized it. Lanny went and rented for one evening a sort of beer-garden in a workers’ district, and there he had a party and played Beethoven’s Country Dances for his little Red and Pink gamins.

  IV

  In October of that year 1925 the governing statesmen of the great nations of Europe gathered for an important conference at Locarno, a town on one of the Alpine lakes which are divided between Switzerland and Italy. Rick didn’t attend this affair, because his new play had been accepted by one of the little theaters, and he was rewriting part of it, in spite of his literary hauteur. Lanny didn’t go, because Marie wouldn’t keep him company and it wasn’t so much fun alone. He read accounts in the papers and magazines, some of them signed by men he knew. Everybody considered it the most important conference since the war; Lanny, who had seen so many of them, tried not to feel cynical about it.

  Aristide Briand, the innkeeper’s son, was Premier of France again, and had taken up the job which he had been forced to abandon at Cannes nearly four years earlier. This time he didn’t need any fashionable ladies to get him together with the Germans; for now France had the Ruhr and was getting so little out of it that peace and disarmament were the mots d’ordre. The German Chancellor was still Stresemann, the pacifier, while the British Foreign Secretary was Sir Austen Chamberlain, a proper Conservative with a monocle, so whatever he did would be ratified by Parliament. For the first time since the war the great nations of Europe met as equals, and the word Allies was not spoken at a conference.

  Of course the diplomats had been working behind the scenes for months, and had planned exactly what they were going to do. They adopted a series of treaties, renouncing war as an instrument of foreign policy. Germany pledged herself to arbitrate all disputes with her neighbors. All these proud nations abandoned a portion of their sovereignty, and the glad tidings went out over the earth that a new spirit had been born. Germany was to be admitted to the League of Nations, and hopes were held out that before long France would consent to withdraw from the Ruhr. The word Locarno became one of magic, from which all good things were expected. Currencies would become stable, trade and industry would revive, the unemployed would be put to work. Even disarmament agreements were being discussed.

  All this, of course, struck a sour note with Robbie Budd and Zaharoff. Robbie had promised his father and brothers fresh trouble in Europe and all over the world, and so his prestige was at stake. It was expecting too much of human nature that he should credit the fine promises of statesmen looking for votes. Robbie wrote to his son that the Germans were buying arms through Dutch and Italian agents, and doubtless some of these arms were going through Locarno while the statesmen were in session. He said also that there was another famine in Russia, and that when the inevitable collapse in that chaotic land occurred, all the bordering nations would grab what they could and the fat would be in the fire. “I have a chance to buy some Budd stock,” wrote the father. “Shall I add it to your portfolio? It will give you weight with the family.”

  V

  An Italian refugee by the name of Angelotti came to the gate of Bienvenu, having a letter of introduction to Lanny. A servant admitted him, saying that Lanny was expected, and the man sat on the front veranda for an hour or more. Beauty saw him and considered him a sinister-looking person—many Italians have dark hair and eyes, and are reputed to be vengeful, and to carry stilettos and the like. Beauty’s distrust of the Reds was of long standing—she having a brother among them. This visitor wanted money, of course; it was a kind of polite blackmail to which Lanny exposed himself, and what would they do if he refused their requests? A thankless thing, for such people rarely repaid, even with gratitude; according to their theories, all your money ought to belong to them, and in giving them a part you were doing less than justice. Beauty would have liked to give orders that all such strangers should be sent packing, but she couldn’t very well, for the prosperous Lanny was now paying half the expenses of the place so that his mother might be able to pay her dressmakers and hairdressers and the rest.

  It happened that there was a murder committed in Paris shortly afterward, and the police were reported to consider it political and to be looking for an Italian anarchist by the name of Angelotti. It may not have been the same man, but Lanny said that even if it had been he would have refused to worry, because such cases often represented police frame-ups, or perhaps newspaper efforts to discredit what they chose to call “subversive movements.” Naturally, this statement caused Beauty distress of mind, and they had an argument, and afterward the mother was uneasy, because Lanny might feel that his rights in the home were being denied him, and he might take up the notion to go off and get a place where he could see his friends when he pleased.

  Beauty and Marie shared this problem, consulting each other and worrying together. And of course Lanny knew about it; people can’t keep things from each other when they are living in the same house. He would go out and spend his time with alarming-looking strangers; then he would find his amie looking hurt; he would ask her about it, and all her tact would be needed to keep a controversy from getting started.

  VI

  Beauty had other worries, more and more of them, and all centering on Kurt. A sense of doom hung over her, knowing that she had had no business to take a lover so much younger than herself, and that some day fate would present the bill and she would pay with her happiness. Day and night she watched her German idealist and studied him, trying to please him, making herself a slave to this strange being. Kurt was a man of conscience, and she could hold him only by being good; but it must be his peculiar kind of goodness. She would lose favor with him whenever she revealed an excess of worldly vanity; he would let her have a fling now and then, just as if she were a drunkard going off on a spree, but it mustn’t last too long or cost too much, and then he Would expect her to come home and be a good German Hausfrau, managing her servants and taking care of her child according to his ideas of discipline.

  With the passing of the years Beauty had grown more and more pro-German in her feeling. Not publicly, for she couldn’t expect her friends to agree, and the best she could achieve would
be to keep them away from the subject. She wasn’t a political person, and couldn’t understand all the forces and factors involved in the struggle for the mastery of Europe. What she wanted was peace in her time, and she would not haggle about the price. The news that came from Locarno rejoiced her soul; at last Germany was going to be allowed to take her place in the sisterhood of nations, and to build up her foreign trade and be able to import food for her hungry children. Germany did really feed her children, and care for her aged, and build decent homes for the workers, all of which practices Beauty praised ardently—never dreaming that they had anything to do with the dreaded Socialism. When her brother Jesse came along and uttered one of his familiar cynicisms, that all capitalist states must have things which they could get only by war, Beauty gave him a scolding so severe that it both startled and amused him.

  During the period of Beauty’s “spree” in Paris, Kurt had stayed at the villa, working on one of his compositions. When he wanted company he would play music for Marceline, and teach her German folk songs; she had already begun piano practice under his direction—and it wasn’t going to be any haphazard, hit-or-miss technique such as Lanny had acquired. Then a cousin of Kurt’s came with his young bride to Nice to spend a part of the summer, and Kurt would get on the tram and ride to visit them. When the cool weather came, his aunt, the Frau Doktor Hofrat von und zu Nebenaltenberg, returned to the apartment in Cannes from which she had been rudely removed during the war; she had vowed that she would never come back, but her health was troubling her, and now the Locarno settlement decided her to give the French another trial. She had told her nephew that Lanny Budd’s mother was unschicklich, so she could hardly be deceived by the pretense that Kurt was Lanny’s music-teacher; but men have been known to do worse things than succumb to the wiles of a fashionable widow, and any arrangement which survives over a period of six or seven years acquires a certain sort of respectability. Kurt came to visit his aunt and was not rebuked; he played his compositions for her and they were appreciated.

  Thus in one way or another Kurt was meeting Germans. They had been coming back to the Riviera, and now with the new spirit of peace there arrived German steamers, brand-new and beautiful models of what a steamer should be, full of large and well-fed passengers desiring to put on bathing-suits and expose their fat ruddy necks and shaven bullet-heads to the semi-tropical sun. They brought with them rolls of money which had mysteriously become more stable and desirable than the franc; with it they could eat French food and drink French wines and put up at the best hotels; French waiters would serve them, and French couturiers would labor diligently but for the most part vainly to make their women chic.

  Many of these Teutons were what Kurt in old days had described as “hottentots,” crude persons without culture, and he had no more interest in them than in Americans or Argentinians of the same sort. But now and then he would meet some music lover or scholar, someone who had heard his music, or, hearing reports about it, wished to hear it. Beauty was always glad to have Kurt’s friends come to the villa, any who were willing to keep up the polite fiction under which he lived with her. Once more the dream of the “good European” was spreading, and Bienvenu would become a center of international culture. This was the thing for which Lanny had been working and struggling ever since the happy days when the three musketeers of the arts had danced Gluck’s Orpheus at Hellerau and had been certain that they were helping to tame the furies of greed and hatred. Lanny felt that the war was at last really over, and that Britain, France, and Germany were reconciled in his American home.

  VII

  At Christmas time the two friends made their customary journey north. This had now become for Lanny a business as well as a pleasure trip. He was learning more and more about the art world; it happened almost automatically—a person from whom he bought a picture would tell his friends about an agreeable young American who had his suits of clothing made with a large pocket inside the vest, having a flap and a button, with a safety-pin as an extra precaution; from this secret hiding-place he would produce a flat packet containing an incredible number of immaculate new banknotes, and would count them out on the table and let them lie there until one could no longer withstand the temptation and would say: “All right, the picture is yours.” Lanny and Zoltan between them had found so many persons who wanted to buy old masters that it was continually a problem with the playboy whether to do the things he wanted to do, such as listening to Hansi’s music and to symphony concerts, or to go out and work up another deal.

  Visiting Hansi was now quite a new experience. It appeared that the pressure upon a rich man to live according to his wealth was irresistible, and here were these Robins in this new and sumptuous nest, with servants in livery and everything perfectly appointed. Johannes was a man of action, and when he wanted something done he went and got experts and had it done right. In this palace he had been confronted by gaping rows of shelves in the library, and he had promptly had the shelves measured, and had summoned the manager of the oldest-established bookstore in Berlin and astounded that personage by saying that he wanted one hundred and seventeen meters of books. There they were, all sizes to fit the varying height of the shelves, and all subjects to fit the varying minds of readers. Johannes didn’t have time for them just now, but his children and his children’s children were going to enjoy culture.

  The Detazes pleased the trader greatly, but they looked lonely on those vast walls, and he said that he wished to place an order for paintings by the square meter, or perhaps the square kilometer. Impossible to leave the place bare, because what was the use of having it if you didn’t have it right? “Isn’t it better to hang your money on the walls than to hide it in a bank vault?” asked Lanny’s old friend. “Here I am getting twelve and fifteen percent for my money, and what am I going to do with so much?”

  “You mean that’s the interest rate?” asked the younger man, somewhat shocked.

  “Our new rentenmarks are scarce,” smiled Johannes. “They must be kept that way to be sure there’s no more inflation!”

  He went on to say that he knew one person whose taste in art he trusted wholly and that was the wonderful Lanny Budd. If he trusted Zoltan Kertezsi, it was because Lanny told him to. His idea was that Lanny and Zoltan should make a study of the palace and turn every room into a small art gallery—not too much, but the right number of pictures with the right atmosphere; they would go scouting over Europe with carte blanche to buy whatever they considered proper. Lanny was staggered, and said, well, really, he didn’t feel equal to it, he hadn’t intended to get so deeply into business as all that. “Take your time,” insisted the money-master. “It’ll be all right if I tell people that I’m looking for the best.”

  For a while the younger man wondered whether all this was part of the price of his half-sister, tactfully offered. But Hansi told him that he hadn’t mentioned-the love affair to either of his parents. Only Freddi knew—having been there and seen. They had decided that maybe they didn’t have a right to speak of the matter; maybe nothing would come of it, and, furthermore, Papa might prefer not to know, because if he knew he might feel in honor bound to tell Lanny’s father. Lanny said they had been wise.

  Hansi took him to his room, where he had devised a hiding-place to keep Bess’s letters. They were written in that expansive handwriting which is taught to young ladies of fashion, perhaps because it uses a great deal of stationery without requiring them to have many thoughts. Hansi let Lanny read the letters, and they affected the brother deeply; they might have been written by a fourteen-year-old Juliet to her Romeo; they were naive, genuine—and comforting to a heart-smitten musician not yet of age. The pair had devised a code for the reciprocation of their sentiments; when Hansi wrote about the weather it was to mean the state of his heart toward the granddaughter of the Puritans, and Hansi said he would declare that the weather was heavenly in Berlin, even when the iciest blizzard was raging.

  While Lanny was there a cablegram arrived fr
om New York with thrilling tidings: Hansi was engaged to make an appearance in Carnegie Hall during the month of April; they would pay him five hundred dollars, the first money he had ever earned in his life. When they were alone, Hansi looked at his friend with a frightened expression and said: “Bess will be eighteen!”

  “All right,” smiled the other; “why not?”

  “What shall I do, Lanny?”

  “Stand up to them. Get it clear in your head that they’re just human beings like yourself; they’re only great because they think they are.”

  “How I wish you’d come with me!” exclaimed the young virtuoso.

  “Don’t let them bluff you, Hansi. You’ll find their bark is a lot worse than their bite!”

  VIII

  The morning before Christmas Lanny and Kurt arrived in Stubendorf. Emil couldn’t come that year; it was some other officer’s turn. Also the two Aryan widows were missing, Kurt’s sister-in-law being with her parents and his sister with her husband’s family. Thus it was a quiet Christmas, but-happy, on account of the spirit of Locarno; Poland had signed those treaties, and the two peoples were doing what they could to get along with each other. Trade was picking up and life was becoming easier.

  Lanny had serious talks with Herr Meissner. The old gentleman was beginning to show his age, but his mind was no less vigorous, and what he had to say about the problems of the Fatherland always interested Lanny; it troubled him also, for it seemed to reinforce the idea of his conservative father and his revolutionary uncle, that the basic demands of Germany and her neighbors were irreconcilable. Lanny still met no one in Stubendorf who had any other idea than to get back into the German fold, or who would think of the present arrangement as anything but a breathing-spell. But imagine saying that to a Pole or a Frenchman!