II
The most alarming fact was that Bessie Budd was of legal age and knew it; she had been making inquiries—in the Newcastle public library, of all places!—and had ascertained that she and her young genius could take a ferry-boat across the Hudson River and without any preliminaries whatever be married in a few minutes. That was what she proposed as a method of sparing her parents’ feelings: to be united to her lover by some judge in a dirty police-court in Hoboken, or in the front parlor of a Weehawken preacher wearing a frayed frock coat and a greasy tie!
Bess was proposing to go back to Germany with Hansi, and the family need have no contact with the despised Jews. Newcastle would soon get over the shock—“Out of sight, out of mind,” said the granddaughter of the Puritans. She had taken up the notion that fashionable weddings were “ostentatious,” and much preferred to start her married career without any rice in her hair. With the self-confidence of extreme youth she never doubted that Hansi was going to make great sums of money; but they weren’t going to spend it on themselves, they were going to use it to uplift the “workers.” They used that Red word instead of saying “the poor,” as Esther would have done. They were a couple of young Pinks, it appeared!
Amazing what had been going on in the mind of an eighteen-year-old girl; appalling to a mother to wake up and discover how little she knew her own daughter! The proud Esther couldn’t keep the tears from her cheeks. “I don’t see how you could do such a thing to me!”
The girl answered: “But you see, Mummy, you make it impossible for anybody to be frank.”
“What do I do?”—for soul-searching, the conscientious examination of one’s self, is a feature of life among the Puritans.
“You are so rigid,” explained the girl. “You know exactly what is good for people, and it’s no use trying to make you see that they don’t want it. When I heard Hansi play the violin, I knew right away what I wanted; but I knew that if I told you about it, you would make yourself miserable and me too, because when I have made up my mind it’s just as fixed as yours, and why should I make you suffer when it couldn’t help either of us?” Bess rushed on, because she had a lot pent up in her.
“You don’t even know the man!” exclaimed her mother.
“If you understood music, Mummy, you’d know that I know him very well indeed.”
“But that is romantic nonsense!”
“Mummy, you’re like a person on the witness stand who gives himself away without realizing what he’s saying. You are telling me that you don’t believe in music as a means of communicating. You might just as well refuse to believe that two people who are talking Chinese are communicating. Because you don’t understand doesn’t mean that they don’t understand.”
Said the daughter of the Puritans: “I suppose there were several hundred women in that audience who imagined they were in love with the violinist.”
“Of course,” replied the daughter of the daughter, “and they were. But only one of them is going to get him, and I’m the lucky one!”
III
It wasn’t the first time in Robbie’s life that he had sat by and watched members of the Budd family slug it out between them. He admired his daughter’s suddenly developed sparring power, and made up his mind that she was coming out on top; but he wanted to keep out of it—for Bess was going to Europe, whereas he had to stay! When she appealed to him for his opinion, he said that he hoped she would find a way to avoid causing unnecessary unhappiness to her mother.
“It seems that one of us has to be unhappy,” argued the girl. “And I surely think it means more to me who is my husband than it does to anybody else.”
“It certainly makes some difference to me who my grandchildren are,” replied the mother.
So they were back at the question of the Jews. Esther, who had been brought up to accept their ancient literature as the inspired word of God, couldn’t plausibly deny that they were a great people. Somehow the opinions of the Newcastle Country Club shrank in importance when you quoted the Psalms of David or the Epistles of Paul; or even when you called the roll of the great musicians who had been Jews. Bess, who had been getting ready for this argument, named a list of names which Esther had heard all her life, but without knowing that they had been of the objectionable race. Hardly a fair debate, when one side has had time to prepare and the other has to speak extempore!
The outcome was a compromise. Esther would pay any price for delay; she would hope against hope that the child might change her mind. She begged her to agree to wait four years and go through college; then she whittled down her demand to one year. Finally she agreed to take six months—and she had to pay high for even that much.
Said Bess: “You complain that I don’t know Hansi; but during our week in Paris you watched me as if I had done something wicked. Now if I give up my happiness for six months to oblige my mother, I surely have a right to be free to meet my fiance as I would any other decent young man. If there’s anything wrong with him, give me a chance to find it out! Here are these boys in a strange city, and Lanny accepted their parents’ hospitality in Germany, and Father did it, too; but you seem to think you’ve done your full duty when you invite the boys to dinner in a hotel and take them to a show!”
Not easy to answer that argument. Obviously, it was Esther’s social duty to invite the young Robins to Newcastle; Robbie wanted it, and had a right to ask it for business reasons. Yet, the moment Esther made this concession, other consequences would begin to follow. When a great lady of society invites anyone to her home, the guest becomes a person of importance, and her prestige requires her to insist upon it. Esther would have to take up the cause of the two strangers; she would have to remember that Hansi was a celebrity, with the glamour of a New York appearance. If the matter was handled properly, his newspaper notices would be reprinted in the Newcastle Chronicle, and the town would be on edge with curiosity. He would give a recital there, and the Budds would shine as patrons of culture. Make a virtue of necessity!
The young Robins were touchingly happy to visit the Budd home, but also a little scared; while they themselves lived in a very fine mansion, it wasn’t real to them, and they wouldn’t have been surprised to wake up some morning and find themselves back in the apartment with the steel door. But where Bess was, there was heaven, and to have her take you driving and show you the lovely New England country in early springtime was enough to inspire several new musical compositions.
Hansi consented gladly to give a recital for charity in the large reception hall of the Newcastle Country Club. The place was packed to the doors, and people paid to sit on campchairs outside, or just to stand and listen. It was the room in which Gracyn Phillipson, alias Pillwiggle, had first met Lanny Budd, and had danced with him with scandalous vivacity. Now it echoed the strains of Kreisler’s Caprice Viennois, and Chopin’s E-flat Nocturne as transcribed by Sarasate, and finally, as a compliment to New England, a transcription which Hansi had made of three of MacDowell’s Woodland Sketches. He made his concert short and sweet, because Lanny had told him that that was what fashionable audiences appreciated—they would much rather talk about music than listen to it. Freddi played his brother’s accompaniments—extraordinarily talented people, these Jews, and, gad, how they do work! All the Yiddishers of the Newcastle valley were there that night—a warm one, fortunately, so the windows were left open and everybody could hear, and according to Robbie’s report the enthusiasm outside made one think of the “peanut gallery,” sometimes known as “nigger heaven.” The crowd applauded and wouldn’t stop, and made Hansi play several encores. There had been no such triumph of the Hebraic race since the days of Solomon in all his glory!
IV
The outcome of that debut was highly amusing; Lanny collected the details from various sources and pieced them together. His stepmother fell victim to her own social campaign—or perhaps to the sovereign power of genius which she had set out to exploit. In the first place, just to have a genius in the house is a startl
ing experience. Very timidly Hansi asked if it would be all right for him to practice; the most considerate of human creatures, he wouldn’t dream of doing it if it would disturb the family—but Esther said no, not at all, go right ahead. It transpired that he was accustomed to practice six or eight hours every day, and he had no conception of vacations. He offered to retire to his room and shut the door; but obviously that was no way to treat a genius; Esther said to use the drawing-room, where Freddi or others could accompany him.
So there was that uproar and clamor, that banging, wailing, shrieking, grinding, going on all morning and most of the afternoon, setting the house a-tremble with clashing billows of sound. It was like living in a lighthouse on a rock over a stormy ocean; only it was an ocean which changed to a new kind of storm every few minutes—in other words, the human soul. Impossible not to be affected by it; impressed by the amount of labor, if nothing else—physical labor, mental labor, emotional labor! Impossible to resist the impact of it, to grow accustomed to it, to be dull in the presence of it—for at the moment when you had done so it devised a new method of attack upon your consciousness, it leaped at you, seized you, shook you. All the angels of heaven were in it—or the demons of hell, whichever way you chose to take it; but either way they wouldn’t let you alone.
And then the social consequences of having a genius in the house; unforeseeable, and in many ways embarrassing to a person trained to reticence and decorum. The weather was warm and the windows stayed open, which meant that the billows of sound flooded the driveway, and people would stop and just stay there. Word spread that there was a free concert at the Robbie Budds’ every day, and crowds gathered as if for a patent-medicine vendor or a puppet-show. They seemed to consider that the presence of genius rescinded the ordinary rules of privacy. Esther would find people on her front porch; not doing any harm, just standing or sitting: a boy who had delivered a package and forgotten to go away; an old friend who had come and hesitated to ring the bell. A schoolteacher of Bess’s humbly sought permission to come and sit on the steps; she would steal up on tiptoe as if it were a shrine, sit with her head bowed, and steal away again without a sound. The servants forgot their work, and friends of the servants sat in the kitchen. The house was besieged—and every one of these persons administering a silent admonition to the daughter of the Puritans who considered herself the apex of culture; each one saying: “Do you appreciate the extraordinary honor which has come to you?”
All sorts of people wanted to meet the young genius; curiosity-seekers, lion-hunters, obviously not persons who had any right to enter the Budd home, and who had to be turned away. Others, more surprising to Esther, persons of her own circle who actually considered that she was exalted to have a Jewish boy as her guest! She was forced to give a reception in his honor, and let the socially acceptable ones come and praise his playing and express the hope to hear more of it.
V
Robbie Budd had a keen sense of humor, and knew the people of his town and the members of his own tribe. Very funny to hear him describe the social war that was waged over those two migratory birds, those Russian Robins, those Semitic songbirds—so he would call them according to his whim. The elders of the Budd tribe coming to look them over, and to warn Esther and himself about the alarming possibility of short-legged and kinky-haired babies appearing in this old and proud New England family. Grandfather Samuel, now nearly eighty, sending for his son and having to be mollified by the assurance that this shepherd boy out of ancient Judea was no upstart adventurer, but the son of one of the richest men in Germany—far richer than any of the Budds!
Esther had fondly imagined that she could keep her daughter’s secret for six months; but in three days the whole town was talking about it. Most distressing, but impossible to prevent! Anybody who looked at the girl while she was with her young genius could see the status of the affair; and there were Bess’s girl friends, keen-eyed as so many young hawks, and her boy friends, in whom she had formerly been interested and to whom she was now indifferent. Newcastle was quite a town, but its country club set was a small village like any other, and Lanny knew from his own experience how fast it could spread rumor and gossip by telephone.
Esther’s friends began coming in to question her about this love affair. By all the social conventions she had the right to lie brazenly about it; also they had the right to know that she was lying, and to say so, provided they used the polite word “fibbing.” They told her that if she didn’t know what was happening she had better; then they went away to take sides on the issue and fight it out all over town. Robbie said it was what the diplomats call “sending up a trial balloon”; they were able to ascertain Newcastle’s reaction to the proposed nuptials, without having to admit that any such proposal had been made. A staggering surprise for Esther Budd: there actually were some among the “best people” of her town who didn’t think it would be a disgrace to the Budds to take a young Jewish genius into the fold! Members of the younger set mostly, the free-thinking, free-spending crowd, who sought their amusements in New York or Palm Beach, and were looked upon with silent disapproval by Robbie’s strict wife; but there were more and more of them, and they made a lot of noise in the community.
It happened that Bess drove her friend to the country club for tea; and all the women came crowding around to pay their tributes to the “lion.” Mrs. “Chris” Jessup, that maker of scandal—she who had got Lanny into the mess with the young actress—came up to Bess and exclaimed: “Congratulations, my dear!” Then, seeing the maidenly blushes, the flashy young matron had the nerve to add, in the presence of quite a crowd: “Newcastle needs a celebrity to put it on the map. The Chamber of Commerce ought to vote you a resolution of thanks!”
VI
Lanny knew his stepmother very well, and could put these episodes into their proper place in the story. She considered herself a person of wide interests, but in reality she was quite provincial. Hearing Hansi play in Paris had meant something to her, hearing him play in Carnegie Hall had meant more, but seeing the people on her front porch meant more than everything else. What broke her down was watching her own daughter; for now that the child didn’t have to act a part, the state of her emotions was painfully apparent. While Hansi was practicing she couldn’t be induced to go anywhere; all she wanted was to sit in a corner of the drawing-room and not miss a single note. She had promised to wait six months, and now she announced what she meant to do with those months—hire the best piano teacher she could find and spend all her time practicing. She had set herself the goal which Lanny had put into her head—to be able to pick up any music score and play it at sight. When she had perfected herself she would be her husband’s accompanist and go with him on all his tours.
Impossible not to know that she meant it; and so for six months the mother would have to go on living in this lighthouse on a rock over a stormy ocean; either that, or have her eighteen-year-old daughter rent an office downtown and put a piano in it! the majestic and powerful Muses called to Bess like the Erlking to the child in Goethe’s ballad. Said Robbie Budd to his wife: “It looks to me as if we’re licked!”
The matter hung in the air until the night before the young Robins were scheduled to fly away to Germany. Bess came to her mother’s room and sank on her knees before her and burst into tears. “Mummy, what right have you to steal my life from me?”
“Is that the way you feel about it, dear?”
“Don’t you see what a responsibility you are taking? You lock me up, and send my lover away as if he were a criminal! Can’t you realize that if anything should happen to Hansi, I could never forgive you? Never, never, so long as I lived!”
“Are you afraid that some other girl will get him?”
“Such an idea couldn’t cross my mind. I think he might be ill, or hurt in an automobile wreck, or if the ship were to go down!”
“Your mind is really quite made up, my daughter?”
“The thought of changing it would seem like murder to me.�
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“Just what do you want to do?”
“You know what I want, Mummy—I want to marry Hansi tomorrow.”
The mother sat for a while with her lips pressed tightly, her hands trembling on her daughter’s shoulders. At last she said: “Would Hansi wait here for a week or two longer?”
“Oh, Mummy, of course—if you asked him.”
“Very well, I’ll ask him, and we’ll arrange it in a decent way—not a church wedding, since you object, but here at home with a few friends and members of the family.”
Bess dashed away her tears, and the music of the violin and piano which had been in the mood of Il Penseroso—“of Cerberus and blackest midnight born”—was changed as by magic to that of Milton’s companion piece. A whole train of nymphs came dancing through the rooms and up and down the stairways of the Budd home, distributing freely their happy gifts—jest, and youthful jollity, quips and cranks and wanton wiles, nods and becks and wreathed smiles, such as hang on Hebe’s cheek and love to live in dimples sleek!
VII
A cablegram telling Lanny of this arrangement came just a couple of days before Marie died; he told her the news, and it brought a smile to her pain-haunted face. That was a lovely young couple, she said; if life would renew itself, in spite of all suffering and defeat. After the funeral Lanny cabled that he was going back to Juan, and inviting Hansi and Bess to come there on their honeymoon travels. He didn’t say anything about Marie; no use complicating the family relationships by letting Esther hear about her. He wrote the news about her death to his father, and also to Hansi in Berlin; Hansi could tell Bess about it in his own way.
Between Two Worlds (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 58